TWIMC - Update on my AMIGA 1000++ project in the subsection "System Specs (Showcase your Retro PC / Build logs.)"

TL;DR:
The assembly phase of my AMIGA 1000++ project is underway! After cleaning and curing my 3D-printed parts, I’ve been test fitting and aligning everything on the Checkmate 1500 case. It's been a mix of excitement and challenges—some parts needed reprints and adjustments for better alignment. Once everything was securely in place, I moved on to sanding to smooth out imperfections before priming and airbrushing. The prep is key to achieving a professional finish. Next steps: priming and airbrushing—stay tuned for more!

A New AMIGA for a 40-Year Legacy

Straightened out alot of mildly bent pins on a S754 3700+ i just bought. Had the outer rows bent inwards and several random pins in the middle rows bent. First time i actually used my Microscope (Tomlov tm4k) and to be fair i was glad i had it .. was so much easier to see the pins that were bent with the top down lights .. if the pin was bent it's "top" didn't reflect light or casted a shadow making them easy to spot. Used a toothpick to push them back into shape. I don't think i could have pulled it off otherwise.

Usually i try to refrain from buying nameless Chinese stuff or buy on Alixpress etc at all but this microscope and my KSGER soldering station have made my hobby so much better/easier. Ofcourse you can't compare these to the real deal but for a hobbyist this makes being able to repair something affordable. This equipment would cost 4-5 times as much from a known brand. So far i bought two things on aliexpress being the soldering station and a power supply for my creative speakers and the microscope via Amazon.

Can you spot the bent pins? 😀 (mind you this was nearing completion so most of em are straight)
Also pic was taken from the screen with phone .. not an actual capture from the microscope.

To give you an idea how this looks from a distance.

G-X wrote on 2025-04-06, 16:50:

Straightened out alot of mildly bent pins on a S754 3700+ i just bought. Had the outer rows bent inwards and several random pins […]
Show full quote

Straightened out alot of mildly bent pins on a S754 3700+ i just bought. Had the outer rows bent inwards and several random pins in the middle rows bent. First time i actually used my Microscope (Tomlov tm4k) and to be fair i was glad i had it .. was so much easier to see the pins that were bent with the top down lights .. if the pin was bent it's "top" didn't reflect light or casted a shadow making them easy to spot. Used a toothpick to push them back into shape. I don't think i could have pulled it off otherwise.

Usually i try to refrain from buying nameless Chinese stuff or buy on Alixpress etc at all but this microscope and my KSGER soldering station have made my hobby so much better/easier. Ofcourse you can't compare these to the real deal but for a hobbyist this makes being able to repair something affordable. This equipment would cost 4-5 times as much from a known brand. So far i bought two things on aliexpress being the soldering station and a power supply for my creative speakers and the microscope via Amazon.

Can you spot the bent pins? 😀 (mind you this was nearing completion so most of em are straight)
Also pic was taken from the screen with phone .. not an actual capture from the microscope.

The attachment cpu1.PG.JPG is no longer available

To give you an idea how this looks from a distance.

The attachment cpu2.jpg is no longer available

Nice work. Very difficult CPU to get. Was it an eBay find?

watching old tv show: burn notice

"when destroying advanced electronics..."

The advanced electronics:

zuldan wrote on 2025-04-07, 03:02:

Nice work. Very difficult CPU to get. Was it an eBay find?

Thanks! Well i got very lucky ... on a second hand website from a neighbouring country it just showed up in the feed one day. Probably because i used the term "Athlon64" or "AMD Athlon" then the algoritm bombards you every day with stuff that relates to your searches. So this popped up and i thought "Well i know S754 didn't go as high as S939 in frequency and thought i should google it" came up being the fastest cpu of the platform and €/$10 later sure enough it's mine 😀 and that's including shipping so i basically got it for a fiver.

Have put it into the socket of my only suitable board that i got in another purchase (MSI k8T) not knowing if it works at all. Put a S939 Opteron box cooler on it and away we go! All i was able to do was boot the system (no drive) but so far so good.

Not exactly today, but a few days ago I recapped a CMI8330A ISA card I got in a lot of soundcards. Inspiration used was @keropi's MK8330, although with THT polymers instead of SMD.

Below is the final result.

Washed the fan and add a little bit of silicon grease to it. Also replaced both thermal grease and the pads.

I’ve always been curious about some vga connectors. The card above has a very short one, obviously because of the fan, but some video cards have really long ones. What’s up with that?

Edit: picture of some long bois.

There are DVI footprints underneath these. It was a way to allow one or the other, before the really miniature VGA ports became available that could fit in front of the DVI connector.

Tiido wrote on 2025-04-08, 18:15:

There are DVI footprints underneath these. It was a way to allow one or the other, before the really miniature VGA ports became available that could fit in front of the DVI connector.

Yes, but in case of Matrox they have an excellent video output, so the VGA connector probably have a better shielding.

You can see from the holes that they don't have that, but they are going to have better impedance matching than the really miniature connectors do.
The matrox image output quality is result of excellent DACs and output filters that don't cut into the pixel edges very much, just enough to pass whatever EMC requirements are and some care in actual physical layout that is often lacking in other manufacturers' cards. ATI did a good job on these aspects too.

Wanted to test a motherboard and was greeted by an exploding cap. 🤣
Board didn't even stop working. Posted fine.
Still shyt my pants tho.
----------------------------------------------------------

The MS SideWinder gamepad arrived to me.

Been doing a variety of little retro related activities recently:

Had a temperamental power switch on a NES console - the console sometimes wouldn't come out of reset when switched on, or the lockout chip would fail and games could randomly crash sometimes. It had a lot of similar symptoms that you'd get with a dirty/worn cartridge edge connector, but I knew in this case it was actually the power switch to blame as simply running your finger over the switch would cause glitches. It just required some electrical contact cleaner spraying into the switch inside. A quick 5 minute job, not a very exciting repair 🤣, but it works absolutely perfectly now!

Also got given a pair of old Viewsonic 1080p 75Hz 24" LCD monitors for free. I envisioned them as more of a simple modern PC daily driver type of thing, until I discovered they actually seem to support 15.6kHz input on both VGA & HDMI (haven't tested DisplayPort, but probably the same) and they handle 240p/288p perfectly. I wasn't expecting that! They're slow at switching between interlaced & progressive, so not great with consoles like the N64 for example, but good for most things, as well as still being great for modern PCs too.

The only other thing I've done recently was testing out a recently purchased Bluetooth Audio Cassette adapter, for untethered loading of games from mobile phone on a couple of my 8-bit micros. I loaded a few games up on my Thomson TO7/70 via Bluetooth and it worked great, so these things are really useful. Plus they also have a headphone out jack at the side, so they can be connected up directly to systems without needing a cassette deck too.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-04-05, 00:44:

Haha, it took me a minute to parse what everything was in that picture. Looks like an interesting setup with the camera monitor. […]
Show full quote

yourepicfailure wrote on 2025-03-27, 09:43:

I kind of don't know if this counts as "retro" (had to use my camera as a monitor since my other CRT is on the fritz) […]
Show full quote

The attachment P_20250326_225128.jpg is no longer available

I kind of don't know if this counts as "retro"
(had to use my camera as a monitor since my other CRT is on the fritz)

The attachment P_20250326_224213.jpg is no longer available

but I tried that "windows NT4 on Wii" drug
it performs just as good/bad as my T4400C cooking with a 25MHz UC'd PODP5V63 and 20Mb ram as you'd expect with NT4. Decent.
Just using some cheapo sd card is killing I/O.

PcBytes wrote on 2025-03-26, 23:27:

Installed Windows 2000 Pro on a Dell Latitude D630 w/ Core 2 Duo T7100 and GM965 graphics.

I'm actually surprised Dell has 2k support for it.

Please DONT remind me...
my NVS 110m D620 is beginning to die!

Haha, it took me a minute to parse what everything was in that picture. Looks like an interesting setup with the camera monitor.
How is NT4 on the Wii? Is there much you can do other than base install stuff?

Today I finally got a new clock generator for this mainboard:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-19, 02:02:

Ahh, I fixed the keyboard which was down to 3 of the traces on one of the keyboard sheets being discoloured from what I guess is […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-02-18, 03:18:

The last few days I've been going at my Toshiba T4400C collection trying to get them all working - I have at last got to enjoy o […]
Show full quote

The last few days I've been going at my Toshiba T4400C collection trying to get them all working - I have at last got to enjoy one and it's a real speed demon...

The attachment IMG_5299 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Well, it's an ISA system from like 1991 / 1992, it's fast for its time. This one is running an SX2-50 processor instead of the regular SX-25.

Last week I bought 2 more because I had spare caps leftover from my recapping of the other power supplies. I don't really intend to keep them all but it's been a learning experience.
See this post for the kind of problems I had: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Two out of four had dead motherboards and I tracked it down on both of them, to the clock generator which is a little SPXO like a surface mount version of a clock can like the one wiretap made a replacement for.
One mainboard I was able to use the working 25mhz clock generator from another motherboard that was broken in other ways, which is now just for parts. That's three out of four working but getting a new 5 volt 25mhz (or 33mhz) clock generator that will fit in the limited space is not easy, it's not micro soldering but a can clock would be too big.
There are some 5v 25mhz clock generators I found but that means waiting for parts to come in and I wanted them all fixed today. And they need significant adapting to fit the weird footprint this clock generator used.

Going through my box of scrap boards I found a 25mhz crystal on an office pbx system board, but it seems to be 3.3v - which requires stepping down because the Toshiba T4400 is 5v all the way, 3.3v was not invented yet when this thing was made. Using a 3.3v LDO, a 1uF MLCC capacitor and some cut capacitor leads as traces, it's all bodged into place:

The attachment t4400c-new-clock-wiring.JPG is no longer available

The attachment t4400c-new-clock.JPG is no longer available

And that works, hooray. Then I found out its keyboard is broken with the enter key not working, which makes it pretty useless. The keyboards on these, the T4500 / T4600 / T4700 / T4800 / T4900 / T1900 laptops are made by Alps and I can't see a way to fix this keyboard, there's a little 3-leg chip glued to the flex pcb and that connects to the enter-key-pad - I can't fix that like I can a regular membrane keyboard.

Ahh, I fixed the keyboard which was down to 3 of the traces on one of the keyboard sheets being discoloured from what I guess is water ingress since the aluminium backing plate was corroded there. Used the conductive paint with kapton tape masking and hotplate paint curing method again, got all 3 traces within 50 ohms and not shorting each other (which they were, but the excess paint scrapes off with a bit of effort). Tested the keyboard in parts and the Enter key now works, put it all back together and re-melted all the heat stakes that hold the keyboard plastic to the backing plate and that worked, hooray.
But now I think that this T4400C #4 has killed a processor since it's tripping the DC-DC board's 5v low voltage limit...
Of course I need to test this - I have this Taken PCI400 that I 'fixed' a few weeks ago!

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-31, 21:52:

What was the original TIM like? Was it still good enough for the cpu to cool properly or did it need replacing? […]
Show full quote

What was the original TIM like? Was it still good enough for the cpu to cool properly or did it need replacing?

I have been trying to use the motherboard I fixed here, my Taken PCI400-4 which was working after a socket replacement and some loose pins around the southbridge resoldered: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I was trying to test an ISA soundcard on it but it wouldn't boot reliably, getting stuck on / flipping between "C0" and "C1" post codes. Initially I thought it was another loose pin on one of the chipsets so spent ages reflowing the solder on those but to no avail.
Shoulda checked the basics at this point specifically clockspeed, but after some time figured out that the board would boot normally if heated around the CPU / northbridge area which is why I thought it was the northbridge. It would work sometimes when started up but it seemed whenever I left it for a while and it got cold, it would go back to being broken.

Using the hot air with a nozzle I was able to narrow it down to the area around the clock generator, the ARK 915A which has a bash mark on it:

The attachment IMG_5162 (Custom) (1).JPG is no longer available

Checking with the oscilloscope it was showing an unstable ~9mhz on the main cpu clock instead of the 33mhz it's supposed to be. Can't find a datasheet for the ARK 915A or Macronix MX8318 clock generators, but the MX8315 is pretty close. There was no clock on the 14.318mhz crystal so I thought perhaps it was the crystal that was bad, swapped that and no difference 😐

The conclusion seems to be that there's a broken bond wire inside the ARK 915A clock generator since borrowing the MX8318 from my Zida 4DPS has made the board reliable again.
When the ARK 915A clock generator is heated up then it will work with the crystal and do its job properly, but when cold the crystal oscillator is dead so I assume that the XO crystal output pin of the clock generator which drives the oscillator, only has a working connection when warm.
If I heat the ARK 915A then it works and it seems to keep working if it works when it starts up, so a heater atop the chip could work. Mechanical pressure also seems to work so I might try some kind of clip on top of the chip to keep pressure on it.
Or I could look at making some alternative clock generator work, I'd rather not do that and replacements for the ARK 915A or MX8318 both seem to be unavailable. Getting an alternative clock generator working would be a lot of work...

Anyways, now the board works again (albeit at the cost of the 4DPS which I'm not using right now) and it's set up for a Cyrix 5x86 processor I thought I'd try out my 5x86 chips - the IBM one works perfectly and seems to run very cool.
I have another one with the green heatsink and cyrix branding and that works just fine as well. Then there's the one I got on this M919 from a junk lot quite a while back: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I've not tested that chip until now because pin R1 broke off when I was cleaning it, there was only the tiniest little dot of a connection poking through the ceramic. I tried soldering a pin directly to that and making it strong mechanically with superglue, but didn't want to test it because well... I don't think that's going to work.
I tried it this evening and the processor was dead, just "--" on the post card 🙁 As suspected, it did not work. Not possible to solder to something so tiny and have that stay connected to something as big as a cpu pin.
A couple of weeks ago though, while I was trying to go to sleep I was for some reason thinking about this and visualised a new way I could do that repair. I have some scrap PCBs that are 0.8mm thick with 2.54mm spaced through-holes, I used the mini grinder pen to clean off all the traces so now I've got some 6-pin segments of a PCB. Those slide over the pins at each corner of the CPU so that this modified CPU sits level in the socket.

The attachment 5x86_Prelim_199507-brokenpin.png is no longer available

I've soldered a long single strand of copper wire to pin R1's little silver dot of a connection and checked it's functioning by checking the resistance to ground of this missing R1 pin for Address line 28 and the adjacent address pin, both measure 17mega ohms to ground so the wire is working 😀
To get the PCB with the wire to sit flush there's a channel carved into the backside and a pin from a very dead Pentium 200MMX is soldered into the front-side of the pin repair PCB, which is better for this than a regular CPU pin because there's a larger peg that sits inside the Pentium's organic PCB. That peg gives a bit more mechanical strength and makes alignment easier.

The attachment cyrix-5x86-pin-repair.jpg is no longer available

The little PCB bits are held in place at the corners with superglue. The strand of wire is looped around from the outside of the CPU / pin repair PCB and is soldered to the pin at the front-side, so it now has no mechanical connection to the CPU pin but has an electrical connection.

The attachment 5x86 cpu and pci400 mainboard repaired.JPG is no longer available

Now the CPU works! 😁

edit: ugh now the floppy controller is giving me trouble... not this CPU that's causing it though!!

The floppy controller on this Taken PCI400 board was not working, giving a floppy disk fail message in the BIOS and not even trying to move the heads. The board around the floppy controller area is immaculate, but these faults don't exist in a vacuum so I started comparing my Taken PCI400 against the Zida 4DPS - the floppy controller (super i/o) chip on the 4DPS has a 24mhz crystal by it, but there's no crystal on the Taken PCI400...
Spent a *while* trying to find where the floppy controller's clock input linked to but it seems to go to pin #5 of the clock generator chip, which I'd swapped out with the clock generator from the Zida 4DPS (this kills the 4DPS).

Checking pin #5 of the clkgen with the oscilloscope when it's on shows that with the MX8318 gives out 16.24mhz - there's yer prahblem. That should be 24mhz according to the W83787IF datasheet and the clock crystal on the Zida 4DPS by the super i/o chip.
So it seems that the Ark 915A incorporates a couple more clocks which the PCI400 makes full use of, not possible to swap the ARK 915A for the MX8318 and still have the board 100% working.

Put the ARK 915A clock generator back and it still does that thing where when it's cold it'll give out an unstable ~10mhz to the cpu which causes it to fail to boot up. It gets better and worse as it gets warmer/colder and it seems that pressing on the chip makes it work more reliably. Here I've tried a metal springy clip on top of the chip to apply pressure, it didn't really work...

The attachment IMG_5328 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Trying another way instead I moved pins 2 (crystal output) and 3 (crystal input or frequency) input out of the socket so that the ARK 915A has no connection to the 14.318mhz crystal that the PLL bases all other frequencies off of. Hooked up the frequency generator to pin 3 and ground and fed it 14.318mhz and it now works every time. This bypasses the damaged connection that I think is on the crystal-output pin that would normally drive the crystal.
Gonna see if I can use some useless microcontroller to use / drive this crystal instead and save this board so it can work all the time instead of only sometimes / only when warmed up.

The attachment IMG_5329 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Lately it seems all the problems I'm facing are clock frequency issues, I could put an SPXO frequency generator there instead but 5v input simple oscillators are hard to find. I actually broke apart one of the broken SMD SPXO oscillators from one of the Toshiba T4400C mainboards and it's got a little tube type crystal inside along with some silicon that drives it, guess the bond wires melt when it gets overvoltage.

edit: aww heck yeah. Went through my box of spare microcontrollers like atmels and pics and the attiny2313a was the best option to hand. Requires no extra circuitry to run the crystal (PICs do) and has a ckout pin, kind of a cruel fate but it's got no code and just has the fuse bits set to use an external crystal and provide the CKOUT pin - doing the same thing as the SPXO on my T4400C motherboards were doing. That feeds into the Clock Input pin of the ARK 915A, with the ATTINY 2313A piggy backing the VCC & GND of the 74LS244 beneath it, with all its other pins folded underneath.

The attachment IMG_5333 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

Now the board starts every time! 😁 (and the floppy controller works great)

I found looking on the retroweb that the UM9515 clock generator is also present on some of the Taken PCI400 boards pictured on there, which includes the 24mhz frequency for the floppy controller. Those are still quite available on Aliexpress somehow so I removed the hacky clock repair solution for the ARK 915 clock generator and put the UM9515 in its place - it works perfectly:

The attachment TakenPCI400 (2).JPG is no longer available

Now the board has no hacky stuff on it and perhaps that atmel microcontroller could do things that involve running code in future 😀
Making sure the floppy controller works is really quite important since I've decided this PC is going be the rebuild of the old family PC because it's currently got the same CPU (not the actual CPU, that lives in a display case on my wall). Right now I'm installing Windows 95 from floppy disks using the Gotek. It'd be quite the task with a real floppy drive.
I'm not totally sure it's as good as my hacky solution because the POST codes were hanging at BF / chipset initialisation where I was tuning it last time this board was out - did it work with tighter timings with the old clockgen? Oh well.

Of course, when trying to do anything some mistakes get made and this one really sucks. My most handy mouse that I use for testing is a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse V2 since it's got good tracking without a mousemat and fully supports PS/2 mouse mode.
I made the mistake of following *just* this page when wiring up the PS/2 mouse header on this Taken PCI400: https://www.engineersgarage.com/how-to-interf … ino-part-35-49/
If you scroll down on there you should see the pinout picture and it shows VCC & GND swapped from where they actually are. Really wish I checked a second source! When I turned the PC on the mouse didn't light up but when I swapped the VCC & GND pins it did, but doesn't detect.

The attachment TakenPCI400 (1).JPG is no longer available

It doesn't detect as a USB mouse now either - it lights up but doesn't do anything. Makes sense, this mouse is so simple and cost reduced down to just the one chip, that reverse polarity did real damage. Why would MS need to account for something that couldn't really happen since PS/2 headers are part of the mainboard since the ATX standard?

Not all bad, I bought a few spare used MS Basic Optical Mouse a while back and took the board out of the junkiest, most worn, most hand cheese covered one. Now my mouse works again at least 😒

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-04-03, 12:55:

Got a Roland MT-100 untested but in very nice condition recently. I knew that it was effectively an MT-32 with editing features […]
Show full quote

Got a Roland MT-100 untested but in very nice condition recently. I knew that it was effectively an MT-32 with editing features and a disk drive...

... what I didn't know was that the disk drive uses 2.8" QuickDisks. 😌

To be honest, I had absolutely no clue that anything was different until the moment I tried to insert a brand new 3.5" floppy disk filled with MT-32 midi tracks... and the disk was too big to fit the drive. I had to look it up to figure out what this format was called because I didn't even know that 2.8" QD existed. I have a pretty good collection of Japanese-made synths, but I don't collect (or know anything about) Japanese computers from the time period that this disk format was used so it has completely flown under my radar.

Soooo... I was able to hook the MT-100 up to a PC and test it that way with midi tracks, and it does work at least. I'm a bit bummed about the situation, because I really enjoyed using an MT-200 to play back general midi tracks from a floppy and I was looking forward to doing the same with MT-32 midi tracks.

Still, it is a really interesting piece, and if I ever manage to get my hands on a hand full of usable 2.8" disks I can probably hold the entire known catalog of MT-32 tracks on those... though I have no idea how I'd get the midi files onto them from a PC. I see that I can also get a GoTek to work as a QD drive with some tinkering as well, but... honestly the MT-100 looks so awesome with the floppy drive that a GoTek would completely ruin the high-quality-1980s-Japanese-electronics aesthetic of it for me.

We need a more authentic GoTek alternative. Imagine a drive with a similar spring + locking mechanism to a floppy drive so that it looks and feels the same, but when you "eject" the disk, it is actually just a carrier for a microSD card... kind of like how they fit into a full size SD adapter, except it'd be floppy disk size\shape. A couple buttons (and a tiny screen) could be fit under a small panel on the front of the drive if necessary.

If I had the means, I would make this. 😅

It's possible to get that going with the MT100 and a gotek: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy/wiki/Quick-Disk
And a replacement front bezel bit: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4541092
Personally though I just don't use the Quick Disk on the MT100, I agree that changing it would ruin the aesthetic of it. I also have an MT90S that I put a gotek in once but after a few months I put the original floppy drive back because that's what made it interesting for me.

Totally stuck now with this Taken PCI400 / 4DPS board. It's horrendously unstable with storage corrupting midway through a windows 95 install if I have a soundcard fitted. Current status after reflowing solder around the 85c496 and washing the board is:
First it was detecting numerous non-existant unknown PCI devices which seems to be solved by clearing a solder bridge.
Second, the main problem now is that the computer hard-locks if it attempts to do anything with DMA, so reading a floppy disk or initialising sound now can't work.

Reading through the 85C496 / 497 datasheets I got annoyed at how the fonts are almost illegible and re-did them with inkscape:

I might try fitting the board into an ultrasonic cleaner since maybe the washing in the sink didn't clean everything properly, maybe there's tap-water residue under a chip or a PCI slot. Mostly I just want to put the board away for a few months but hopefully others can use this 85C496/497 pinout diagram.

I added a socket 7 CPU fan to one of my computers. It was running very loudly and sounded kind of rough sometimes at startup so I switched it out for a new one last night thinking a bearing was going bad with the first one... But it seems the second, brand new fan fresh out of the box, does the same thing. I guess the fan runs extra fast and at some irregular speeds for a minute or two before normalizing. Is this standard for PC CPU fans on mid 90s PCs during boot up?

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-04-09, 13:15:

I might try fitting the board into an ultrasonic cleaner since maybe the washing in the sink didn't clean everything properly, maybe there's tap-water residue under a chip or a PCI slot. Mostly I just want to put the board away for a few months but hopefully others can use this 85C496/497 pinout diagram.

My ignorance makes me reply.
Isn't anything interfering with the dma signal that is common to chipset and cards? A cap? A res? Maybe a +v leak that gives a false signal like e.g. those i/o chips for isa? Something in that loop that misbehaves.

Thanks for the diagrams.

Playing around with Tualatin adapter. I actually ordered well known "eBay Korean guy" PCB adapter for my Coppermine only MSI MS-6163 V2.0 and GA-6VX7-4X.
Even with slightly sloppy soldering it worked. For MS-6163 rom.by BIOS mod worked right away, but GA-6VX7-4X is using AMI bios. So I asked eBay seller and he provided link and he did. Very smooth transaction.

However in retrospect I don't think this is the best way because process destroys CPU pinout. So no way I'm going to hard mod my 1.4S Tualatin(s). With Slot1 boards I'm willing to sacrifice Slotket or even MB but not CPU.
So I found slower 1.113GHZ version in my spare parts bin and it worked well.

This might warrant it's own thread at some point, but for now I will just post it here.

I have been reassembling, repairing and testing a bunch of hardware I got from a (really nice) scrap lot. The seller actually found a whole bunch of the brackets that had been removed from them and was happy to include them in the box... along with some packaging to protect things at least a little.

It looks like absolutely everything in the lot (that wasn't already damaged) survived the trip thanks to this person's masterfully efficient packaging. Sadly, some of the VGA, 9pin serial and parallel connectors on some of the cards were also missing their little metal shielding-bits... like these...

On most cards these are part of the connector and are seemingly attached permanently. But on some others, they are not, so they fall off easily once the screws and bracket have been removed.

Does anyone know where to get these or what I would search for to find them for the various sizes and shapes that exist? Normally I would just take them off of worthless cards but the vast majority cannot be removed so it is rarely possible to harvest them without struggling and completely mangling them.

I started removing the rubberized coating of my Thinkpad 770E, because it's very sticky and needs to go.

Using 99% IPA and an old credit card I was able to get a lot of it off, already - but it's very painful to do so and needs multiple passes of soaking until it comes off.
IBM rubberized everything on this model. The inside of the battery bay, the lid, palmrest, bottom...even the damn DVD drive has a rubberized front panel.

This is gonna be painful. I feel like IPA is not the best solution for this - maybe I'll try the baking powder paste trick next or essentials oils. Otherwise I'll be rubbing until I get muscle cramps!