Spent nearly all day yesterday benchmarking my AMD Socket 754 SLI system with my new 6800 Ultra 512MB SLI pair. Only to determine later that it turns out the performance is pretty shitty and I ended up just sitting it aside to sell later and bought a AMD Socket AM2+ nvidia-590 SLI board instead. See "bought this retro hardware" thread for post about it.

Tested out my newly acquired Gigabyte board today. Booted fine with the 200mmx and 128mb Dimm and a PCI 3D Blaster Banshee. Just need to get a PS/2 Mouse and AT keyboard adaptor.

Really looking forward to doing a build around this and using it primarily as a DOS machine , even have a nice AT mini tower case on the way.

I'm thinking Spec will be as follows.

Intel Pentium 200mmx
Gigabyte GA-586TX3 AT board
64mb SD Ram
Creative Labs PCI 3D Blaster Banshee
3D Sonata SR163 OPL3 & OPL4 Sound Card

On the sound front I have the above listed card along with a SB16 CT2230, ESS Card with ESS Wavetable and a Awe64 so may have a play around with the others also.

Started the project to rebuild battery packs for old laptops. Started with a battery for the Thinkpad 770Z. It was easy enough to open, now studying the internals. I think I will have to ditch the internal cells altogether; it has 3 groups of 3 cells, the cells in each group are in parallel and the 3 groups are in series. One group reads 0V so it's shorted, dead. One group reads 2.64V so it could be salvageable. One group reads 1.9V but it's the opposite polarity of what it should be (the + has become -), so it's probably more than dead. I've actually never heard of a Li-Ion battery to become reverse polarized, sounds dangerous.

I've mapped the connections. The problem is that the batteries are all welded directly to metal strips that run directly to the PCB; I don't see a way to remove them from the metal strips without damaging the strips, thus I won't be able to reuse the internal connections. I will have to desolder the PCB from the strips and build a pack from scratch with new batteries, new connector strips and them connect with wires to the PCB.

There are also 2 protection devices, a 10kohm thermistor and a Klixon 4MM80H1-13 thermal protection relay ( http://www.sselec.com/data/parts%20specs/Part … hemostats-2.pdf ). They appear to be good, and I'll probably be able to reuse them.

Played a ton of UT99 in WINE on my Cloudbook today. Troubleshot my lack of a decent framerate, it was my using D3D that did it -- switching to OGL made everything butter-smooth even at 1080p at the highest settings. On patch 436 (its my understanding that 451 is mostly for servers?) and with the bonus packs. Played online on a couple of servers, one for here, one for not.

Might qualify as retro, might not.

Well today I decided to make one servicable Acorn RiscPC out of two flaky systems I have. Took a couple of hours and worked out real good. So now I have a servicable 710 ARM system with 4.39 ROMs. That makes No.5 of my collection.
I'm after a 2meg vram module for it and I'm done.

Apart for doing some more testing of PCI sound cards in DOS I installed a Creative Audigy 2 ZS in my server. I'm using the Audigy as a part of a virtual MIDI box on a Windows 7 VM running it in PCI passthrough mode.

Got detracked from my attic and played some internet games of HW2 (can still connect via IP, worked the first time and had a couple great games!). Currently working on getting the dreadnought buildable for both sides in MP.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Did some more sorting. And I'm contemplating to perhaps inventorise all my stashed motherboards today, since this will probably take many hours (will do some basic checking and perhaps some resorting while I'm at it) and I have spare time today.

This needs some photos 😀

I'm always eager to learn new organisation tips. It's funny, I'm terrible with names, but I do remember pretty much all the parts I have. I use plastic containers, smaller plastic boxes and various sandwich type bags to organise everything.

You're still welcome to come visit and browse around for yourself (that offer still stands), could make for an interesting vid or something 😀.

Haha, yea you never know 😁

What I did recently to organize my stuff: in my retro room in the basement I built 3 stacks of 5 shelves each. I found some large plastic containers with snap-on lids, of which 3 fit perfectly on each shelf. The containers are large, probably around 10 gal each. I can fit a total of 45 of them on the new shelves. I lined with aluminum foil the ones in which I put ESD-sensitive parts. This, combined with the 2 bookcases that I already had in the place, was almost enough for everything. I did end up stuffing a few containers in the wife's closet next door. 😀

You can get a glimpse of the shelves and containers in this pic:

The box in the bottom right corner, for instance, has about 10 motherboards in it.

Impressive collection, stamasd. 😀

clueless1 wrote:

Impressive collection, stamasd. 😀

Thanks. To be honest it's not all computer stuff. Many boxes have electronic components, tools, FPGA stuff, Arduino and Raspberry Pi stuff, chemicals, 3D printing filament, etc. For instance the green-lidded ones at the left - one has seeds and gardening supplies, and another has brewing supplies (as in beer-making glassware, tools, malt etc). The USPS boxes in the middle are full of CPUs that I have yet to go through and categorize. 😁

stamasd wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Impressive collection, stamasd. 😀

The USPS boxes in the middle are full of CPUs that I have yet to go through and categorize. 😁

Drool...

Just moving stuff about in my room.

I've started documenting my rebuild of a laptop battery pack.

https://stamasd.wordpress.com/

Completed refurb of a PS/2 model 55SX with the Reply planar upgrade.

Now all that is left is to repackage the machine and ship it back to the customer.

Put my K6-3+ build in a case, not quite finished yet 😀

Put the finishing touches on my build.

Gotta love those Teac combo floppies.

Veeb0rg wrote:

Put the finishing touches on my build. http://i.imgur.com/cdOLyesl.jpg […]
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Put the finishing touches on my build.

Nice speakers. Used to have the same ones but Creative Labs-branded.

Veeb0rg wrote:

Put the finishing touches on my build. http://i.imgur.com/cdOLyesl.jpg […]
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Put the finishing touches on my build.

Saw your post on Reddit. Looks awesome and clean, nice job.