I'll check on the extra 1MB tonight and report back.

I have finally gone through all my Amiga disks. The result is two boxes, filled to at max capacity with 880kb disks.
The disks not in boxes, are just a few of my entire collection of empty disks. So they will be filled with other games.
Need to make a single/extra copy of each game, in order to have two sets of each Amiga game, in case disks fail.
Going to use X-Copy for that process... Boinggg...

Wear a wrist brace! 😁 Good thing you have an external drive, it can get even more tedious than amazingly tedious with only 1 drive.

Trying to revive my 486SX that I bought this weekend and nearly killed already.
After that it's cleaning up the monitor, case, speakers, mouse,...it came with because this hardware had a rough end of life it seems 😒
Next summer I am gonna try and retrobright as much as possible

FuzzyLogic wrote:

Nice 486! I assume you got the extra 1MB of RAM added for 1280x1024. And I had that Mitsumi keyboard on my P90, but it broke and I threw it out decades ago. I need to get a new one for authenticity.

Many thanks. Here's the video card. What can you tell me?

brostenen wrote:

I have finally gone through all my Amiga disks.

From one Amiga fan to another, well done on your dedication.

Don't forget, you can always store the ADF files on a Compact Flash drive and write them back to the Amiga Floppy Disks.

At the recent UK, South West Amiga meet, I had my Parallel Iomega Zip drive attached and working with my Amiga 1200.

It was also connected to the internet via my mobile phone and a travel router.

I'm also a fan of the latest 'Amiga Forever' on the PC. I've installed Amiga Final Edition 4.1 too.

andrewreader wrote:

Many thanks. Here's the video card. What can you tell me? […]
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FuzzyLogic wrote:

Nice 486! I assume you got the extra 1MB of RAM added for 1280x1024. And I had that Mitsumi keyboard on my P90, but it broke and I threw it out decades ago. I need to get a new one for authenticity.

Many thanks. Here's the video card. What can you tell me?

I can tell you that's a 1MB VLC S3 86C805-P from '93...

Decided to bring a spare GPU (nVidia GeForce4 MX440 AGP) to install in my Socket 370, and no video output. Time to test the capacitors.

CkRtech wrote:

Heh. Nice helmet!

Only a Packers helmet will work for the Bean n Bacon Megarocket.

andrewreader wrote:

Many thanks. Here's the video card. What can you tell me? […]
Show full quote

FuzzyLogic wrote:

Nice 486! I assume you got the extra 1MB of RAM added for 1280x1024. And I had that Mitsumi keyboard on my P90, but it broke and I threw it out decades ago. I need to get a new one for authenticity.

Many thanks. Here's the video card. What can you tell me?

I was referring to this post: Re: VGA VLB S3 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 86C801/805, basic info and this: http://modelrail.otenko.com/retro/486dx266-s3-86c801805-vlb

Tested a new to me Acorp 5ALI61 Alladin V based SS7 baby AT motherboard and
realized the PS/2 keyboard to AT port adapter I thought I had is the exact opposite....

In any case, this is going to make a sweet K6-III+ build once I get an adapter.

cyclone3d wrote:

Tested a new to me Acorp 5ALI61 Alladin V based SS7 baby AT motherboard and
realized the PS/2 keyboard to AT port adapter I thought I had is the exact opposite....

In any case, this is going to make a sweet K6-III+ build once I get an adapter.

My 386 and 486 both sit waiting. I'll be dead by the time these arrive.

cliffclaven wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/V81ZqCK.jpg […]
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cyclone3d wrote:

Tested a new to me Acorp 5ALI61 Alladin V based SS7 baby AT motherboard and
realized the PS/2 keyboard to AT port adapter I thought I had is the exact opposite....

In any case, this is going to make a sweet K6-III+ build once I get an adapter.

My 386 and 486 both sit waiting. I'll be dead by the time these arrive.

I ordered one that should be here in a few days and a couple more that were cheaper that will take a while to get here. Edit: actually ordered from the same seller from the looks of it.

But I do feel your pain. I am still waiting on a couple powered PCIe riser cables and a couple IDE to SATA drive adapters. The IDE to SATA adapters were supposed to be here 4 days ago now 😢

cyclone3d wrote:

Tested a new to me Acorp 5ALI61 Alladin V based SS7 baby AT motherboard and realized the PS/2 keyboard to AT port adapter I thou […]
Show full quote

Tested a new to me Acorp 5ALI61 Alladin V based SS7 baby AT motherboard and
realized the PS/2 keyboard to AT port adapter I thought I had is the exact opposite....

vadernoo.jpg

In any case, this is going to make a sweet K6-III+ build once I get an adapter.

That's funny, same exact thing just happened to me. What a dope I felt like. Thankfully I got one from an ebay seller for like $3 shipped, works fine!

cyclone3d wrote:

But I do feel your pain. I am still waiting on a couple powered PCIe riser cables and a couple IDE to SATA drive adapters. The IDE to SATA adapters were supposed to be here 4 days ago now 😢

Between ebay and amazon, I have 10 separate orders I am waiting on.

Yay, my 486's hard drive died the death, so I have to acquire another. As fortune would have it, I have SIX identical copies of the dead drive in the basement, but as they're only 430MB, and equally dirty from a decade of storage in a shed, I'll consider buying something better. Also found a bunch of old ISA sound cards (Ensoniq?) and a few 8 bit parallel and serial port cards. Might slap them into some systems I'm building. Unless they're for a Tandy, which equally possible. Made icons for Monkey Island and Wing Commander, but motivation is severely low.

Edit: Meh.

Same location as the first set, a page or so back. I may be relocating my sites, so I don't like hard-linking on sites that are so long-lived as this.

cliffclaven wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

But I do feel your pain. I am still waiting on a couple powered PCIe riser cables and a couple IDE to SATA drive adapters. The IDE to SATA adapters were supposed to be here 4 days ago now 😢

Between ebay and amazon, I have 10 separate orders I am waiting on.

Last couple times I've been in that situation they all coincidentally arrived at the same time. The concierge in my building never knew my name before, but they definitely do now.

Today I will finally replace the broken floppy drive from my Compaq Contura 400c laptop with the drive from inside a cheap 12EUR USB floppy drive from ebay.

YES! It turns out that most of these cheap USB floppy drives on ebay are actually either new or NOS Teac drives, that - as it turns out - are only crippled in terms of formats they can write by the USB translation PCB that is cramped on their connector.

Once removed, these SlimDrives can write all formats again when connected to the FDC in the Compaq Laptop.

This is a very nice tip for anyone that has to remove 90s laptops diskette drives (mostly SlimDrives). You can actually use those cheap USB floppy drives from ebay. The drives are either NOS, or refurbished, and once the adapter is removed from the ribbon cable connector, they are un-nudered again. (they can write all the different formats besides 1,44 and 720 again.) And most importantly, they are accepted by almost ALL 90s laptops I tested so far. (An exception being of course IBM, they use proprietary slimdrives in their Thinkpads that (although seem to be working in other Laptops) are not able to read sector 0 (boot from, format, etc)

Finally got around to checking out the software my Japanese Yamaha MU-10 set came with:

- Cubase Lite Plus 1.5 with Music Box, fairly simple sequencer that Steinberg set up in such a way that there are separate Japanese and English help files. One annoyance is that it defaults to using my soundcard (Ensoniq AudioPCI) MIDI OUT port instead of the onboard synth, with no option to set the synth as default. I'll have to check whether there's an .INI file where I can set that, because it has to be changed for each instrument track individually (which is a pain in the behind) every single time a file is loaded 😵 . Has the sequencer part, piano roll, and GM/GS/XG settings dialog box (which also handily shows all the General MIDI instrument names). Music Box is a simple MIDI file player, which has one drawback: MIDI files keep on playing after the notes have ended.
- Voyetra Orchestrator Plus version 2.0, which is quite a bit more advanced. This is a special Japanese version for Yamaha synths, with an interface that's mostly in English with some Japanese thrown in. There are a few minor graphical glitches related to Japanese text display on my US Windows 98SE version... everything else seems to work properly. Help files are entirely in Japanese unfortunately, so I'll have to look for a manual in English as the software is quite complex (sequencer, piano roll, digital audio tracks, wave editor, sysex, various settings editors, and a function where I think you can sing notes into a microphone and it will convert it into a sequence of notes). Besides General MIDI, this special Yamaha version has preset banks for the Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard (default settings), MU80(XG), and two FM synths: TX7 and TX81Z (!). What's irritating is that there doesn't seem to be a way to display a named list of the available patches for a given synth setting - or I haven't found it yet - figured it out, you first have to assign a MIDI channel to a patch before you can choose a patch. The program seems to support up to three different MIDI devices at once, pretty cool.
- Visual Arranger Jr. Couldn't install this one as the installer is in Japanese and it asks for a installation key (I think it's given in one of the manuals) and something else.

Then decided to check out the Falcom MIDI CDs I bought a while back, copied all the MIDI files to my vintage gaming machine so I could play them through the AudioPCI (using Voyetra Audio Station 2, not the Cubase Music Box). Pretty good.

I swapped every Choyo capacitor on my Gigabyte GA-5AX to Rubycon caps since it had some stability issues.

Three hours of sheer terror as the board was obviously assembled with leadless solder and had pretty gigantic ground planes. On some places I had to use two Weller soldering stations at the same time (one set at 400ºC and another 60W unit with no adjustment) to melt the solder and push the old cap through and the caps between the PCI and AGP slots were real pain in the ass to remove. I added leaded solder to every joint before unsoldering them to make the heat transfer more efficient but it was still literally worse than Hitler.

By the time I had replaced every cap I was pretty sure the board was permadead now since in some areas the varnish on the motherboard had clear damage from the heat and I really had to heat some of the through holes to get all solder out of them. To my suprise it still booted up but I'm not sure if every slot and other stuff on the board works correctly or if there is any damage to the traces on the bottom layer or in the areas around the through hole vias inside the PCB. It's currently running Super Pi 32M, I didn't put my K6-III+ on, just a K6-2 because it's easier to replace if the mobo decides to fry it.

Does anyone have a good advice on how to remove capacitors on these old boards without damaging the board? Any way to protect the bottom layer which gets most of the heat and is most likely to get rekt during the process?

I have replaced lots of caps in display power supplies before but doing it on the motherboard was really stressful as the ground planes were huge and there were thin traces everywhere around the vias for the through hole caps.