luckybob wrote:

even the 300w unit is overkill. I'd check the voltages, under load, of that psu first. Anything more than 5% off, the psu goes in the trash. I've had bad power supplies kill stuff, I don't take any chances with that. Special, expensive, power supplies are worth re-capping but your average ATX? hells nah.

For me, it matters more if the PSU is relatively well constructed and complete. Warning signs like unsafe or absent input filtering, anemic pi filters, four diode treatment for the rectifier, small gauge wiring, etc are all reasons to store it in the recycle. Well maintained garbage is still garbage.

gdjacobs wrote:

luckybob wrote:

even the 300w unit is overkill. I'd check the voltages, under load, of that psu first. Anything more than 5% off, the psu goes in the trash. I've had bad power supplies kill stuff, I don't take any chances with that. Special, expensive, power supplies are worth re-capping but your average ATX? hells nah.

For me, it matters more if the PSU is relatively well constructed and complete. Warning signs like unsafe or absent input filtering, anemic pi filters, four diode treatment for the rectifier, small gauge wiring, etc are all reasons to store it in the recycle. Well maintained garbage is still garbage.

That works great until things get to be of XT age and power supplies (original) are unobtanium and everyone is clawing a scratching for ANY working PSU.

Retro-fied my computer as much as Windows 10's crippled personalization features would allow me to. 😜

gdjacobs wrote:

For me, it matters more if the PSU is relatively well constructed and complete. Warning signs like unsafe or absent input filtering, anemic pi filters, four diode treatment for the rectifier, small gauge wiring, etc are all reasons to store it in the recycle. Well maintained garbage is still garbage.

This.

And I am sure that some have thrown out an old, well-built power supply in favor of an "affordable and newer" model - that is basically a time bomb in their retro machine.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

That works great until things get to be of XT age and power supplies (original) are unobtanium and everyone is clawing a scratching for ANY working PSU.

If things get that bad, we'll just start building our own power supplies from scratch. 😁

did a quck and grtty OC of my qx9650. I have it at 4.25ghz with 8gb of OCZ ram at 1066mhz.

sould be able to hit 4.6ghz with any luck. But I'll have to wait untill I get windows insatll on the system latter this week as I been running the system from a live CD. I can't stand linux as it is but the live CD just makes it far worse.

Bought a Tandy CoCo 2 for ten times as much as I had paid for the one I got from Goodwill back in 2006 or so. Here's hoping it arrives in working condition. Still keeping an eye out for a cheap Atari XEGS keyboard and power supply. The latter I could build, but like most EE projects, I don't have nostalgia to motivate me.

I finally updated the BIOS on my EPoX 9NDA3J Nforce 3 Ultra Socket 939 board to the latest version after scouring the internet and discovering it at a Hungarian download site.

I bought the board back in 2005 and used it with an Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8Ghz. With the latest BIOS, however, it supports dual core CPUs up to the FX-60! So, I took my brother's old 4200+ from his dead Abit AN8-32x (that I just can't seem to fix... the solder on the caps doesn't want to melt, even with my Hakko iron set to 850F... even after pre-heating the board and removing heatsinks), installed it in the EPoX board, and its plugging away nicely! This makes me very happy, because I love maxing out old boards. This will be a nice companion for the BFG 6800GT AGP I bought last year for $20 (identical to the card I used in this board at the time).

Because the BIOS update for this board is so hard to find, I will attach it to this post.

Also, just for nostalgia's sake, I'll upload a picture of my system when I originally got this EPoX board in May of 2005, as well as the overclock I achieved with the 3000+ single core:

Was trying to figure out last night why the new diskettes I got didn't get recognized in my HD 1.44MB floppy drives, tried to format a diskette, and it came back with a Track 0 Bad error. It also would've helped if the moron that was trying to format the floppies would see if it's a High Density (1.44MB) or Double Density (720KB) diskette, and they're all DD diskettes. Oh, well. At least I made a boot diskette (will only recognize FAT16 fixed disks, not FAT32 since it was formatted on my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus running MS-DOS 6.22), drivers diskettes for my sound card (Windows 3.X) with the utilities (MS-DOS) to test the card, and copied the config.sys and autoexec.bat files onto a floppy so that way I don't have to manually input the appropriate parameters.

The next thing would be to share the CF card to my other computers so that way I can back up the files listed on there, put the 428.1MB HDD back in as the Master, and CF card as the slave, re-format the drives, copy the backup onto the CF card, and install MS-DOS 6.0, then upgrade to 6.22, install Windows for Workgroups 3.11, all the drivers, and I'm done.

Drive C --> MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Drive D --> Games and stuff
Drive E --> CD-ROM drive

CkRtech wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Tested the PSU Voltage on my C64: […]
Show full quote

Tested the PSU Voltage on my C64:

5V DC: 5.07V (passed)
9V AC: 0.63V (failed)

Looks like a rebuild is in order (cheaper than buying a we one).

Hey - share your rebuild details if you proceed, would you?

Found a forum that has the necessary parts you need, plus the building process (YouTube videos): Commodore C64 "Re-Brick" Power Supply. The third page has the parts you need, plus the videos on YouTube as well.

PSU Diagram:

Schematic: PSU Schematic

bjwil1991 wrote:

Schematic: PSU Schematic

Another option is to keep it simple and combine a couple of power bricks - I've been using this bad boy for a couple of years now with no ill effects:

Commodore 64 revival (warning, wall of pics)

badmojo wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Schematic: PSU Schematic

Another option is to keep it simple and combine a couple of power bricks - I've been using this bad boy for a couple of years now with no ill effects:

Commodore 64 revival (warning, wall of pics)

I don't have any 5V DC bricks or 9V AC bricks, except for a universal brick that supports 3V, 6V, 9V and 12V, but that's going to be used on a radio project I'm going to be doing.

Correction: I have 2 5V DC bricks, but only rated for 1 Amp. The 5V DC line requires 1.5A, but safety must be provided if the 5V line overloads.

Shops have them!

Jost got vista installed on my c2 setup.
Saidly the boards raid 10 support was limited to 4 disks. So I went with raid 0. 6 raptors in raid 0 sould be fast.
But ill need to get a usb hdd or something to image the system.

badmojo wrote:

Another option is to keep it simple and combine a couple of power bricks - I've been using this bad boy for a couple of years now with no ill effects:

Commodore 64 revival (warning, wall of pics)

Slightly more elaborate (but still pretty simple) in the same vein. Get a couple of these guys:
https://www.banggood.com/XL4015-5A-DC-DC-Step … ml?rmmds=search

Dial one in to 9V, the other to 5V, feed it through a fuse to the inputs with a 12 or 18 volt wall wart good for 50W or so.

nice idea, but the 9v is AC.

Yep the whole C64 PSU thing gets Commodore nerds all worked up - many a thread on the subject has ended in a flame war. In saying that tho, many an original Commodore PSU has gone up in flames, so it's worth persisting and coming up with something that works for you.

badmojo wrote:

Yep the whole C64 PSU thing gets Commodore nerds all worked up - many a thread on the subject has ended in a flame war. In saying that tho, many an original Commodore PSU has gone up in flames, so it's worth persisting and coming up with something that works for you.

I haven't powered up my C64 in... 8? years. (!) I wasn't aware of the psu issue at that time. I made a note a few years back to address the psu prior to firing it up again, and I just haven't gotten around to giving it top electronics priority.

Diabolically evil.

oeuvre wrote:

Diabolically evil.

So many questions...

luckybob wrote:

nice idea, but the 9v is AC.

Oh. I didn't expect that. Low voltage inverters are much harder to find, unfortunately.