luckybob wrote on 2023-07-01, 21:30:

I feel like we should? In fact, I will. […]
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Don't ask me why I have it, the story is way too long.

I feel like we should? In fact, I will.

What's the story behind the cannon?

^.^

( I like stories)

Hehe, all right. Long story short then. Drawings of an old cannon foundry from before the "Russian burnings" in Sweden, kept in the family. By tradition, we're metallurgists. My father, a friend of his from the de Geer family, and me, going out digging back when I was a teenager. Assuming that the valuable stuff already was found, we aimed for the more obscure points in the drawings. Found three cannons, one each, basically lumps of rust then. Been working with mine to and from since then, you can see the result in the picture 😀

kaputnik wrote on 2023-07-01, 21:44:

Hehe, all right. Long story short then. Drawings of an old cannon foundry from before the "Russian burnings" in Sweden, kept in the family. By tradition, we're metallurgists. My father, a friend of his from the de Geer family, and me, going out digging back when I was a teenager. Assuming that the valuable stuff already was found, we aimed for the more obscure points in the drawings. Found three cannons, one each, basically lumps of rust then. Been working with mine to and from since then, you can see the result in the picture 😀

Wow, that's a really cool bit of family history!

Today I took out a cute little Zida 5DVX I picked up recently and was verifying the jumper settings for the P166 MMX it came with - all good until I got to the voltage jumpers and was confronted with this:

Those are all supposed to be open for 2.8v. Uhg. I could snip them sure, but that's not something that's easily reversible for me (for now; I'm working on upping my game in that respect - yes, I can see that some pin headers could be installed there). I would rather put a non-MMX Pentium in there than make the mobo MMX-only, unfortunately I don't have any non-MMX CPUs. 😅

For now I'll stick with this similar Gigabyte board but I'd rather have the Intel chipset on the Zida board...

Edit:
Also, these are the USB headers:

C'mon fellas... 😂

If I was being lazy, I might just apply a soldering iron to the bottoms of those wired jumpers and push them flush to the board on the back, so there was about an extra 3mm in the loop on top.... then snip them carefully in the middle, and unbend them straight up with a pair of needlenose pliers and tadaaa, row of what are practically jumpers, caps will sit on them for trying stuff out, not as durable as the tinned bronze pins of course.

They could be soldered in place because your particular revision lacks a regulator for split voltage altogether..

Not really a "retro" activity, but I was repairing a PS4 controller that I got cheap from eBay, where the left stick wouldn't run in games when pressed and held in the upward position, it was intermittent.

Should have been a quick 10-15 minute job, hardly worth mentioning. It turned into 3 hours of disassembling and reassembling the damn controller about 7 times. The first attempted fix made the issue much worse with the left stick now drifting. From that point on it was a case of solve 1 problem, then another problem appears, then solve that problem and another appears and so on...

Finally sorted it after much frustration & cursing and it's now fully functional once again.

However - I'm awaiting a replacement rubber contact for the D-Pad, as the current one is worn & slightly damaged. I'm already dreading having to open it up again for a "quick 10 minute job" to replace it. 🤣

Vintage market 2023 July.

Fairly big with street performers and some noteworthy vintage electronics.

I didn't spend that much though. There was a seller with a lot of banana boxes and a lot of hardware in questionable condition, but each item was only about 1.5€ so I thought I take my chances.

The result:
Abit Siluro Ti4200
SATA&IDE controller
**I also picked up a kensington lock and a mini hand drill

From different sellers a slipcover Gears of War for PC and a Halo 3 for Xbox. It was only at home that I realized Halo was the German version, but it either defaults to system language or the game itself is not localized.

As for the Ti4200, at first it didn't post on DVI so I tried the VGA output and yeah... it seems to be faulty. It's a little prettier in Windows, with only 5 vertical lines of corruption, about 2cm thick, so maybe salvageable?

The other day I made this 3d print for the 486 DX4 100 VLB, AT motherboard I jammed into this MicroATX desktop case:

I have a box of spare 5.25" blanks and one of them happened to fit so I modelled up its clone in Fusion 360 and put in some cutouts for the power switch and turbo button. I forgot the reset switch so it looks like this version is going to use the power button for reset instead.

Unlike the last time I made one of these things that adds a turbo display, this time I have time to make the display actually do something. I bought a bunch of 3 digit 7-segment displays a few years back for my 1st 3d printed case front, but it sat unused because back then I didn't know enough about electronics or arduino to make it work.

This time though, I have lots of parts and a bit more knowledge - here's where I'm at:

This thing is now working pretty reliably using just the arduino micro clone board to drive the LEDs and it has a very open-ended way to set the turbo speeds:

• Like Wiretap's turbo display, I've chosen to use the turbo LED high/low state as the selector between high/low speed
• And it relays the turbo LED in the same way
• There are two speed dials, that on toggling the turbo mode get sampled so the speeds can be changed while the computer's running
• Turning a dial moves the value between 8 > 999mhz, from a set of 50 pre-set values to round the sensor reading to a nice value
• Two of the spare IO pins are used as jumpers to set either value to be high range (8 > 999) or low range (8 > 233) to make it easier to select the low values

Now to see if it'll work on the breadboard with this spare atmega8a MCU I've got, then see if it could work well on a PCB potentially 😀

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-07-02, 14:31:

Vintage market 2023 July. […]
Show full quote

Vintage market 2023 July.

Fairly big with street performers and some noteworthy vintage electronics.

IMG_20230702_103808.jpg IMG_20230702_104415.jpg

I didn't spend that much though. There was a seller with a lot of banana boxes and a lot of hardware in questionable condition, but each item was only about 1.5€ so I thought I take my chances.

The result:
Abit Siluro Ti4200
SATA&IDE controller
**I also picked up a kensington lock and a mini hand drill

IMG_20230702_153934.jpg

From different sellers a slipcover Gears of War for PC and a Halo 3 for Xbox. It was only at home that I realized Halo was the German version, but it either defaults to system language or the game itself is not localized.

As for the Ti4200, at first it didn't post on DVI so I tried the VGA output and yeah... it seems to be faulty. It's a little prettier in Windows, with only 5 vertical lines of corruption, about 2cm thick, so maybe salvageable?

IMG_20230702_160140.jpg

Maybe? I'd recommend recap, reflow, and reflash VGA bios. Those are usually the big 3, if none of those do anything its probably either a bad BGA that would need a real BGA rework, or a faulty memory chip. Inspect for missing components as always. Little SMD resistors having broken off is another common one.

And it's behaving on the breadboard now with an Atmega8A, this is getting transferred to a stripboard PCB tomorrow. Kinda funny, the bugs I had to track down were each caused by my trying to make the variables more efficient (changing int values to bytes)

Cool stuff, that's yet another project I've got on my multitude of back burners. Pondering something fancy that flips jumper settings for me. I've got an idea that with some clockchip plls, that they way they support deturbo, it may be useful to buffer speed switching such that things don't glitch. Also had a mind to blend function with an arduino drive emulator, that has a bunch of images, so it's all push button to boot into things at the right speed. IDK if that's going a bit too far though, removing all the retro touchie feelies. Anyway, it's a bit of a "this is the way I personally wanna do things for me" kinda thing, even though there are other similar things out there.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-07-03, 00:34:

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-07-02, 14:31:

Vintage market 2023 July. […]
Show full quote

Vintage market 2023 July.

Fairly big with street performers and some noteworthy vintage electronics.

IMG_20230702_103808.jpg IMG_20230702_104415.jpg

I didn't spend that much though. There was a seller with a lot of banana boxes and a lot of hardware in questionable condition, but each item was only about 1.5€ so I thought I take my chances.

The result:
Abit Siluro Ti4200
SATA&IDE controller
**I also picked up a kensington lock and a mini hand drill

IMG_20230702_153934.jpg

From different sellers a slipcover Gears of War for PC and a Halo 3 for Xbox. It was only at home that I realized Halo was the German version, but it either defaults to system language or the game itself is not localized.

As for the Ti4200, at first it didn't post on DVI so I tried the VGA output and yeah... it seems to be faulty. It's a little prettier in Windows, with only 5 vertical lines of corruption, about 2cm thick, so maybe salvageable?

IMG_20230702_160140.jpg

Maybe? I'd recommend recap, reflow, and reflash VGA bios. Those are usually the big 3, if none of those do anything its probably either a bad BGA that would need a real BGA rework, or a faulty memory chip. Inspect for missing components as always. Little SMD resistors having broken off is another common one.

Agree'ed (I second that ... list of sugestions).

XCVG wrote on 2023-07-01, 20:36:

I finally upgraded my main retro rig (Pentium III 1GHz, Win98SE) from a GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 3. I've had this card for over a year now but just hadn't got around to installing it (and to be honest, for what I play on that machine the old card was fine). To my surprise it's a Ti500, though only the 64MB version, I thought it was an early plain GeForce3 (it had very few markings to identify it by). It was given to me by a friend who pulled it from a random computer destined for recycling. I think the fan is not original but it seems to work fine. I played a bit of Quake III and I'll try to give it more of a workout in the future.

I have had a devil of a time identifying GF3 Ti variants - they tend to look very similar, and even worse a lot of brands changed anodyzing colors partway through the production run.

I have two VisionTek Xtasy cards I've seen reviews of online listed as Ti200s, Ti500s, and unlisted but inbetween in performance. I did a few tests, they were right below the 8500LE and Ti4400, but I'm pretty sure that test was CPU-limited. The next time I do some benchmarks I will try to duplicate a system I can find a benchmark for as "real" Ti500 for.

PTherapist wrote on 2023-07-02, 11:32:

Not really a "retro" activity, but I was repairing a PS4 controller that I got cheap from eBay, where the left stick wouldn't ru […]
Show full quote

Not really a "retro" activity, but I was repairing a PS4 controller that I got cheap from eBay, where the left stick wouldn't run in games when pressed and held in the upward position, it was intermittent.

Should have been a quick 10-15 minute job, hardly worth mentioning. It turned into 3 hours of disassembling and reassembling the damn controller about 7 times. The first attempted fix made the issue much worse with the left stick now drifting. From that point on it was a case of solve 1 problem, then another problem appears, then solve that problem and another appears and so on...

Finally sorted it after much frustration & cursing and it's now fully functional once again.

However - I'm awaiting a replacement rubber contact for the D-Pad, as the current one is worn & slightly damaged. I'm already dreading having to open it up again for a "quick 10 minute job" to replace it. 🤣

On the bright side, now you're an expert at repairing PS4 controllers.

I went through something like this removing some parts from a parts car that I was about to send to a junkyard. In the end I was glad that I'd know what I was doing when I did the same job on the car I actually care about. That was over 2 years ago, the parts are still in a box, and I've forgotten the procedure.

Attempt no.1 to go the "hard way" and convert the tube camera's RGB to something vga-like
The LM1981 worked great to take the sync signals from the composite out and make the horizontal and vertical syncs that a monitor happily locked to:

But it doesn't like the RGB, which I piped right out of the camera (set to output rgb).

And what the camera is outputting:

It almost looks inverted. If anyone out there can give some advice, I'll take it.
And yes, the monitor is capable of working with a 480i signal, I also tried on an old ultrasharp with composite in and the same thing.

I've removed the battery, cleaned the damaged area and fixed traces on this 33 Mhz 486 VLB motherboard. According to the Retro web I believe this is an unknown 495XLC motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/unknow … x-vlb-1x-8b-isa

The thing is, I cannot locate the turbo switch. Can anyone help me on this one?

It may just not have one. On some AMI boards you use CTRL+ALT+[+] CTRL+ALT+[-] to Turbo/Deturbo IIRC.

Today's : Endevour - salvage oparation .

(I kicked the drive by mistake,yesterday , luckly was broken so not sure how much extra dmg I did)

MHDD 4.6 , only app that see's it.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-04, 11:53:

It may just not have one. On some AMI boards you use CTRL+ALT+[+] CTRL+ALT+[-] to Turbo/Deturbo IIRC.

I've tried it and indeed it works. But honestly, I don't like this turbo/deturbo option via keyboard very much. However better than no turbo/deturbo at all.

Turbo -> wrote on 2023-07-04, 11:48:

I've removed the battery, cleaned the damaged area and fixed traces on this 33 Mhz 486 VLB motherboard. According to the Retro web I believe this is an unknown 495XLC motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/unknow … x-vlb-1x-8b-isa

The thing is, I cannot locate the turbo switch. Can anyone help me on this one?

Is it not the jumpered 2 pin header next to TB LED? I.e. with the jumper on the header turbo is always on. Difficult to see from the photo. What happens if you remove that jumper?

Today, after a particularly geeky argument with a coworker, I loaded up an AAC encoded audio file and realized, for the very first time, that lossy audio compression is actually Good Enough. Perhaps it's because a part of me is still stuck in 1999, but I honestly didn't think that lossy compression of any kind would bother keeping frequencies above ~18 KHz. Yet, here it is stretching all the way to 23KHz:

This must mean that AAC is perceptually transparent right? I mean, I doubt that even the 44.1 KHz PCM source would contain much, if any, information above 22 KHz. By the way, this particular song was purchased from iTunes back in 2017. Foobar shows bit rates ranging from 210 to 366 kbps, generally hovering around the 275 mark.