debs3759 wrote on 2025-04-26, 15:22:

zuldan wrote on 2025-04-26, 03:21:

Pino wrote on 2025-04-26, 02:41:

Installed a Zalman cooler on my 9700PRO.

It's my all-time favorite VGA and they tend to die, so I will try to keep it cool.

Does the bottom of the cooler fins touch the top of the AGP slot?

That's just the angle of the shot, being taken from very close.

Correct, just bad angle on the picture, the fins does not interfere with the AGP slot, it was perfect clearance.

Working on the DOS machine today. Got the PicoGUS installed, up and running. I like it! Next in line, a DreamBlaster.

As suggested over in the PicoGUS thread, I'm going to run both the PG and AWE64 together. That gives me all the sound compatibility I could ever ask for!

On a side note, my DOS rig is now covered in as many stickers as my 90's DOS rig was, thanks to Geekenspiel. 😜

Got some for my Win98 system too, just not on there yet.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-04-14, 03:29:

It's been a while but I found a couple videos on Youtube that piqued my interest for this again. I follow a couple of folks in J […]
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Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-07-23, 21:54:

Nice, I'll have to try something like that at some point (though I have no roland card or real GuS). What's the resource managem […]
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Nice, I'll have to try something like that at some point (though I have no roland card or real GuS). What's the resource management like, is it using the original software or something like unisound?

I bought an untested NEC Versa V/50 laptop the other week which had essentially destroyed its hinge, not plural, it only has a right hinge, the left just holds it in place:

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It has no power supply which was stated in the auction, but it didn't state that no hard drive was included. This NEC needs a special caddy and the pinout is unknown, there are a couple of them on ebay but they cost 5x what I paid for this computer, no thanks.

The power supply part is relatively easy - I got an NEC Versa 4000C recently too and in the service manual for that it's got the dock pinout listed.
Ground was easy to find, just see which pin beeps against a port's metal shield. To find positive I ran a multimeter in beep mode across the dock pins. In the service manual the pins it beeped with match up where it's got "12v-sys" compared to "12v-charge" on the other possible pin.
Cut up some LCD inverter plugs since they're a good fit for this size of pin and decently conductive, jammed them in and now I have a PSU adapter:

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To repair the hinge / LCD panel corner, which had broken up into 5 pieces and destroyed every screw mount; thankfully enough plastic was still attached that it could be repaired by:

1. Superglue the parts in the way they fit best
2. Melt some metal pins / staples into the plastic with a soldering iron (with ventilation, heating superglue makes bad fumes). Did this on front & back
3. Using a wedge tip on the soldering iron, melted some shapes into the flat areas on the inside, all around the broken bits. My thinking is that this gives much more texture for epoxy to grip onto.
4. Taped off where epoxy shouldn't go, then poured on epoxy to the inside of the LCD panel corner and installed the LCD hinge bits
5. Put some tape over the clip corner of the front facia and installed that so the epoxy would set around where that clip goes and the display still goes together nicely later
6. For where the hinge attaches to the top case I first got some longer screws (this laptop uses m3) and put some extra threaded inserts onto the longer screw, then melted that all into where the hinge plate used to screw into
7. Taped off and blutack/taped an area for epoxy go in the hinge area of the top case, then poured in epoxy around where the screws were
8. Once that had partially hardened I took the screws out and flattened the area where the hinge plate screws to
9. There was one standoff for the topcase that had sheared off where the top surface was accessible and not part of the palm-rest, so I melted in a threaded insert to that post. Then melted a hole through the top-case where that mounts and put in a countersunk screw

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Creepingnet's post on VCF made me aware that the hinge is so tight that it probably destroyed that plastic, so I loosened the hinge off slightly with some pliers and washed out the original grease stuff with some PTFE lubricant. It's a little floppy but the plastic now feels decently solid so it's operable and the screen works okay in this state.

I discovered that it could boot and the screen was good, but what to do with no fixed disk? It has an NEC floppy drive which is a really early and nice direct-drive floppy, no bad belts! And the system can boot off that, so I've set up DOS 6.22 with PCMCIA services on a floppy disk and I have a PCMCIA ATA flash card that is otherwise not used:

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This method actually works surprisingly well, DOS refuses to install on it through the installer - but Windows 3.1 will happily install onto whatever drive you point it to. It very likely would not be able to run Windows 95 though.
There's still one free PCMCIA slot so getting files on and off is easy, so I'm not sure I'll actually bother trying to get the hard drive caddy for it.

It can run Windows 3.11, and even ran DOOM but it has no soundcard (yet??) and with only 4mb of RAM, DooM must've been running from the Windows swap-file 😀

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One problem I do have is that the screen is sometimes flickering quite badly and that doesn't seem to be the backlight, but seems to change depending on what the computer's running, it's bad in DOS but looks fine in Windows. Weird, I wonder if it's capacitor related?

It's been a while but I found a couple videos on Youtube that piqued my interest for this again. I follow a couple of folks in Japan that share videos of their PC98 stuff so I don't feel much need to get a PC98 (a deep rabbit hole that I don't want to get into outside of emulation) and this popped up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk_7Jhpq2X4 and this shorter video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Orc59I0gPA
They're both NL6448AC30-10 which is the 9.5" TFT panel that's in my NEC Versa V/50 laptop, which had this weird thing it does where it flickers when displaying black and makes a straining noise while doing so. Displaying whiter stuff like Windows 3.11 stopped the noise / flickering.

Watching the video, I had originally thought that the NL6448AC30-10 LCD panel had no capacitors and it was all solid state - not so, there are caps hiding inside the display PCBs on the back sandwiched in place and held completely in place by the soldered down cables that connect up the column driver chips:

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Those caps are all so crusty, thankfully I have some 33uF 25v SMD capacitors in stock since they're so common in LCD panels. I used the grip & twist method to remove these and they all came off with damage to pads, another year or two and the traces might've been damaged enough to let go with this force applied:

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To clear these up, I just put on some fresh solder then use my solder sucker with a rubber tip (abeco flexivac 2008) to get the traces flat. Solder in fresh caps:

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Then solder the connector back down being careful to avoid any shorts, thankfully the wire spacing gives a lot of room and there's lots of space to work. Nasty flux they left on the board too, but no corrosion which is good for ~31 years of age.

And we're done, the pictures look just like the last pic I took of the Versa V/50 with Windows 3.11 looking great on there. The floppy drive uses a voice coil instead of a stepper motor and the spinner is direct drive so it's so different for reading floppy disks compared to any other laptop I own. Now the screen no longer flickers when displaying black and no more weird noises 😀
Did some more plastic repair as well, since the disassembly inevitably broke a few more clips and parts of the casing. Not that the plastic is excessively brittle but I was able to do better this time re-melting the plastic around threaded inserts and stuff. My new favourite tool for plastic repair is just regular staples, they melt into plastic nicely and are stiffer than capacitor/resistor legs.

It's funny as well, the english speaking internet has no search results *at all* for the repair of this NL6448AC30-10 LCD panel but the Japanese internet, searching for "nl6448ac30-10 コンデンサ" which is 'kondensa', the japanese term for capacitors, has a ton of results. If only advancements in tech/AI could break the language barrier for search.

Following on with this, my NEC Versa V/50 has been operable but not very useful because I don't have the hard drive caddy or any memory expansion. I also have not had the proper charger for this - that changed the other day when I won an auction for an NEC UltraLite Versa which doesn't power on. It doesn't power on (has the same corroded 1.8432mhz crystal that creepingnet mentioned on his one too) but it had the hard drive caddy, 8MB memory card and the OP-520-4001 charger:

The hard drive works great and the 8MB memory expansion is also really helping. But the charger wasn't working when plugged in, 0 volts output.
Opening it up the board is all sticky with what I thought might be cap juice but after spending ages cleaning it off, both manually and with the ultrasonic cleaner. I'm now less sure because all the caps except C8 (35v 56uF) & C9 (35v 22uF) tested good:

Those two caps are too small to have leaked that much capacitor, so I think it was just weird flux now, maybe.
Put all the caps back on and replaced C8 & C9 and now the charger outputs 13.5 volts on its running voltage pins. Those little caps, particularly the 35v 22uF are typical for running the switch mode psu controller. I'm very happy it was just that because my ability to troubleshoot a switch mode PSU doesn't go much further.

Testing it with my NEC Versa V/50, it's a rather *big* charger, like xbox 360 power brick kind of size. That's just how things were in 1992 / 1993, the battery charging stuff was in the charger rather than the laptop and my Toshiba T4400 power supply is similarly rather big. It has worked for a couple of hours though and I was able to charge the battery to discover that the batteries are dead after all.
The NEC UltraLite Versa (486SL 33mhz, PC-432-1531) is still not working and I don't have much faith that I'd be able to get it running, quite a few corroded vias. It's really a lot like the Toshiba T4600C inside, bleeding edge for its time with a load of small SMD electrolytic capacitors & regular electrolytic caps that are leaking, losing capacitance or otherwise failing.

Now if only it could have a soundcard somehow, I'd like this NEC Versa even more if it did. The screen is really nice since the capacitors were replaced and I'm liking the NEC-made TFT's colour profile compared to the Toshiba LCDs from the same era. The NEC support software seems to be a little nicer than Toshiba's for this era too, thankfully people archived the Versa V setup disks: https://archive.org/details/nec-versa-486-disk-images
Reinstalling the OS and software from floppy was fun - I used just two disks and my USB 2.0 LS120 + WinImage to write the images, so that while one floppy was being read on the laptop, the other floppy was being re-written on my main computer. No trouble at all from this NEC floppy drive 😀

Sucessfully repaired my latest aquisition.
An Asus 486SV1 EISA/VL based machine with Adaptec 1742 SCSi und 2MB Diamond VL graphics.
Bigtower with two floppy drives, SCSI CD-ROM, Tapestreamer and a huge heavy SCSI HDD.

One Tantalum on the -12V rail was shorted, preventing the PS to start and one of the rare 4MB 30pin Simms seems faulty and caused a reboot loop during post,
or a strange screen showing just the number 5000 white on blue in the middle of the screen.
Just have to dig for the boards cfg files in my archive to get rid of the EISA config error and have a look at the content of the 600MB SCSI brick installed.
Funfact, Asus still has the BIOS for the board on the web, but not the cfg-file needed for the EISA config.
Replacement batterie or a Dallas chip mod may be needed too.

Spend Sunday morning at a local Retro Tech swap meet. Got rid of some things and only managed to pick up one system a few odds and ends. Was a pretty decent turnout, much bigger then the last one. Hopefully the event continues to grow!

Decided to do some overclocking on my P45 ASUS Maximus II Formula running a Q9650 with a 750W PSU and 2x 5870’s in Crossfire. Upped the CPU voltage to 1.32v with CPU running at 3.6GHz. The machine then randomly shutdown. I swapped the 750W PSU with a 850W PSU and she’s rock solid stable now. I think I could reach 4GHz but that’s probably going to involve playing with memory voltages etc. I’ve ordered a E8600 which apparently will OC to 4GHz with just a CPU voltage increase. It’s probably more suited to the games I will run which only use single or 2 cores.

Inspecting an AT case I got recently. Never saw a jumper-free LCD with battery backup for storing the clock speed. It still had some juice in it, but 100 was a bit standard. 😉

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-28, 17:22:

Inspecting an AT case I got recently. Never saw a jumper-free LCD with battery backup for storing the clock speed. It still had some juice in it, but 100 was a bit standard. 😉

Make sure you replace the battery even if it's still working. Got a case some time ago which also had a jumper-free LCD. It contained 2 batteries. Both of them leaked and destroyed the pcb. Had to replace it with a selfmade Arduino solution.

Thanks for the advice, I removed the battery and the contacts were a bit white/green. So vinegar and alcohol it is...

Successfully modded my NOS Aliexpress Chinese Socket 370 board (mostly a copy of Gigabyte GA-6VTXE) for some extra FSB options
then along with the vcore mod I installed, played some Aliens VS Predator 2 with my old Gigabyte TNT2 Pro and a Celeron 300A @ 472.5mhz 105*4.5
Had to turn down settings a bit, but just enjoying an overclocked alternative system that I never had in the day. I had an AMD Duron at the time.
I have some p3's and Cyrix and Tualatins to try when I've finished playing with the Celeron.

I replaced the screen polarizer of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1R that was starting to have vinegar syndrome and in addition the image was all very yellowish, i guess also for the same reason.

I know that is not that a big deal maybe but It was my first polarizer replacement and i am very happy with.

I have another PCG-C1 that is starting to look very suspicious so i will replace it very soon.

nach wrote on Today, 06:45:

I replaced the screen polarizer of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1R that was starting to have vinegar syndrome and in addition the image was all very yellowish, i guess also for the same reason.

I know that is not that a big deal maybe but It was my first polarizer replacement and i am very happy with.

I have another PCG-C1 that is starting to look very suspicious so i will replace it very soon.

Wow, how did it go? I've had to do that on my Vaio PCG-C1XN's original panel, but I had a spare undamaged panel on my PCG-C1VFK that's got a sort-of damaged motherboard.
I stripped the bad polariser off of the bad one and so far all I've done is stick a non adhesive polariser in front, which was sort of working without sticking to the glass but over time it has started to contact the glass giving that 'air bubbles' kind of look.
I've replaced the polariser with proper adhesive ones on a different LCD, the one on my Toshiba Portege 610CT - the Toshiba LTM09C031A and even though it went well there were still a couple of air bubbles. And because I was replacing both the front and rear polariser I got careless with the LCD ribbon connections / cof cables and now there are vertical stripes on the screen, so it's ruined. I have more polarisers to replace but if I can't get it perfect then I don't want to do it since it's ~£5 per application attempt for a polariser film.
Ya know - I did notice that putting a layer of cellophane between the LCD glass and the polariser - stops the non-adhesive polarising film 'sticking' to the glass and the cellophane doesn't either. I was doing that to fix the colours of a DSTN panel but I should try it with a TFT to see what it does, maybe it could make non-adhesive polarisers easier to make look good without that partial adhesion occuring.

I do wonder why it seems like the Vaio Picturebook series' polarisers are especially affected by vinegar syndrome, even ones that have spent most of their time in the UK can go bad.

eisapc wrote on 2025-04-28, 07:59:

Sucessfully repaired my latest aquisition. An Asus 486SV1 EISA/VL based machine with Adaptec 1742 SCSi und 2MB Diamond VL graphi […]
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Sucessfully repaired my latest aquisition.
An Asus 486SV1 EISA/VL based machine with Adaptec 1742 SCSi und 2MB Diamond VL graphics.
Bigtower with two floppy drives, SCSI CD-ROM, Tapestreamer and a huge heavy SCSI HDD.

One Tantalum on the -12V rail was shorted, preventing the PS to start and one of the rare 4MB 30pin Simms seems faulty and caused a reboot loop during post,
or a strange screen showing just the number 5000 white on blue in the middle of the screen.
Just have to dig for the boards cfg files in my archive to get rid of the EISA config error and have a look at the content of the 600MB SCSI brick installed.
Funfact, Asus still has the BIOS for the board on the web, but not the cfg-file needed for the EISA config.
Replacement batterie or a Dallas chip mod may be needed too.

Nice 😀 That's a pretty rare system - regarding the 4MB SIMM being bad, I was going through all my bad SIMMs last year and found that the SIMMs that were bad were almost all fixed by just finding loose connections and resoldering the legs where necessary. Perhaps touching up all the solder joints would recover that SIMM for you, could be easy if it's a 2/3 chip SIMM rather than a 9 chip SIMM.