xjas wrote:

Not from the dumpster, but I "found" this stuff in my own storage room which I only have access to once or twice a year (it's 50 […]
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Not from the dumpster, but I "found" this stuff in my own storage room which I only have access to once or twice a year (it's 5000km away from where I live.)

CameraZOOM-20170204005251156.jpg

It's highly likely I have the box for the Voodoo Banshee (top left, a Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix) around too.

Going through the whole thing right now with the intent of keeping what I want and letting the rest go; there's tons more interesting hardware and a lot of big box DOS/Win95 games in excellent shape. Still trying to figure out what to do with it all. Somewhere in there is a boxed GUS PnP with 8.5MB RAM that I would **really** like to get my hands on.

That Banshee looks beautiful. I would love to trade something for it. 😀
I am always looking for cool stuff!

Found this today! I don't know, if any of this stuff works but it's looking good 😀

A week ago I found an old reel-to-reel player just sitting on one of those big 100W speaker next to the dumpser. Since I need one for parts I grabbed it, and the speaker too.

Turned out that the tape mechanism is ruined, but it has all the bits and pieces I am missing for the second one I inherited from my grandpa years ago. But since outside was -15°C (5°F) that night and it was snowing, I just let it slowly melt and dry in my basement.

(Second one - bottom left)

And today I picked up computer which I felt sorry for, but was ruined.

All coolers are missing, even from northbridge. GPU which was flopping around is some made by Hercules, it is missing the fan aswell. Generic LAN card, pretty worthless. But what caught my eye - what are these RAM slots? I think that I have seen them at some point, but I can't point out what are they. Also, one RAM slot has its lock broken off and a green jumper was floating around. CPU is 1.7GHz Pentium 4.

The motherboard is an MSI 850Pro5 (MS-6545), is based on the Intel 850 and it uses Rambus memory (RIMM/RDRAM), the motherboard and videocard might still work if is not damaged and have no missing components, the CPU will still work for sure.

About the missing Jumper, look at the manual of the motherboard (you can find online) and check all jumper combinations in case you find where are the missing jumper

Thanks for the info. That sure does ring a bell.

On the other hand I will not bother with trying to revive this board since I don't have the memory and I am currently not in position where I can afford to buy something I don't really need, sadly enough, so to the non-working/parts/unknown hardware crate it goes...

lazibayer wrote:

I found the manual of the rightmost MFM to SCSI converter and I gave it another try and still couldn't get it to work, so I went ahead and purchased an RLL controller:

WechatIMG2.jpeg

It asks the geometry of the drive before formatting and I am not sure about what value I should gave to the "WPcom" parameter. I did a google search and got two answers, none or 128. I tried none and the formatting finished with one bad sector at C255 H2 S15 IIRC. The following DOS format told me 16KB in bad sectors with a cluster size of 2KB. So I guess DOS quarantined 32 adjacent sectors?

I think I have bricked the hard drive. I changed the WPcom from none to 128, LZone from 615 to 664 according to stason, redid the low level format, and the program reported error 01H while formatting cylinder 127. So I changed everything back and now low level formatter marks every track as bad track. Is it still salvageable?

lazibayer wrote:

I think I have bricked the hard drive. I changed the WPcom from none to 128, LZone from 615 to 664 according to stason, redid the low level format, and the program reported error 1H while formatting cylinder 127. So I changed everything back and now low level formatter marks every track as bad track. Is it still salvageable?

I would attempt a standard DOS format if you can. While not technically the same thing, I've accidentally formatted 360KB floppies as 1.2MB. Lots of bad sectors when I finished formatting. Once I realized the error I reformatted as 360KB, the bad sectors disappeared. Again, not exactly the same thing, but perhaps a standard format may correct "bad" sectors.

Not a computer per se, but I salvaged components from it 😀

My father and I were tearing a broken down full-size scanner/fax machine for scrap metal and I was able to harvest a few parts from it.

I got:

- SHARP MFPC Type-SR Rev 1.2 main motherboard, 4x slots for RAM (2x filled, one 512MB stick and a 1 GB stick), 5x slots for boot flash modules (3x filled), a connector which was connected to another PCB (not salvaged), 1x SATA port, a heatsink with most likely the CPU under, and serial, USB, and LAN ports on the side.

- Simple 12volt fan with a connector I might mod to make it a mini case fan.

- A mini pull-out keyboard I might mod into a USB keyboard or something.

- A Western Digital Caviar 80GB SATA hard drive (!) which was connected to the SATA connector on the motherboard.

I've yet to see what's on the hard drive, I will try to boot it in another PC. It's probably the OS the machine ran on.

stoof wrote:

OK, this is not a PC or even a computer, but: it's hardware, it's retro, it's got a floppy drive and it's MIDI compatible, so I figure it's relevant...
In a futile attempt to actually REDUCE the amount of crap in my home, I was off to trash some stuff, but while doing so:
Lots to like here: early '90 aesthetics, memory expansion, nice keyboard, etc. Here is what vintage synth explorer has to say about it.

Very cool board - nice find!

krivulak wrote:

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And today I picked up computer which I felt sorry for, but was ruined.

All coolers are missing, even from northbridge. GPU which was flopping around is some made by Hercules, it is missing the fan aswell. Generic LAN card, pretty worthless. But what caught my eye - what are these RAM slots? I think that I have seen them at some point, but I can't point out what are they. Also, one RAM slot has its lock broken off and a green jumper was floating around. CPU is 1.7GHz Pentium 4.

This seems to be a MSI 6545 (Intel i850) motherboard for the Pentium 4 with 4x RAMBUS memory slots.
They need to be installed in pairs, you can also use "terminators" if you only have one DIMM. Good luck! Cool board for a Pentium 4 / RAMBUS enthusiast. 😎

got mYself a old computer from a local website, going to use the case for my next project
Contains an unknown Lucky star Via apollo VP mobo, AMD K6 266 Mhz, SB 128, 12 MB edo, unkown brand PSU. Nothing to fance but the case is all I needed, the SB and PSU are a bonus (will have to check the PSU for caps though)

^ That case looks suspiciously like an older version of the case of my ill-fated AMD Duron system, which died of a power supply not able to supply enough juice to run the computer under load...

Just pulled this terminal out of the trash, it's waaaaay too far gone for my expertise and I'd never find the replacement keys even if I wanted it just as a shelf decoration. I was gonna just leave it at the scrappers but I think I'm actually gonna retrofit this little beauty with a proper VGA CRT and a DOS mobo or something. 😁

And before anyone bashes me for what I intend to do with it, just look at this thing. If it weren't in this condition and even remotely salvageable I would definitely try and fix it but it looks absolutely fucked. 😒

I don't know. I managed to rescue and revive worse, like Commodore PC20-III left in metal scrap pile in friend's backyard for a year. Still worth a try in my opinion.

First step is getting it clean. When it will be, it will look thousand times more salvageable.

No I mean look at the rust and stuff, plus the fuse cap is smashed and the housing for the fuse is smashed upwards. Also I will most likely never be able to replace those keys. Also I should note I've never successfully done a component repair that involved soldering. 😒

King_Corduroy wrote:

No I mean look at the rust and stuff, plus the fuse cap is smashed and the housing for the fuse is smashed upwards. Also I will most likely never be able to replace those keys. Also I should note I've never successfully done a component repair that involved soldering. 😒

Time to learn better soldering! 🤣

Yeah but that would require buying a better soldering iron. 🤣

Also that screen has delaminated, the safety glass covering the CRT has separated from the actual CRT.

Just wiped it down and it looks better though admittedly.

@King_Couduroy
imho, I'd love the opportunity to restore a unit like this. If you want to embark down that path; http://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum.php? is the website to get started. Even if you want to pass it to someone else, that forum would be the place to do so.

Another good day for trash. 🤣

Gonna make this into a 2000's gaming machine. 😁