the_ultra_code wrote:

Two things. […]
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Two things.

One, added the same StarTech 5.25" 3.5" drive bay into my Pentium 3 machine, just like I did with my P4 machine.

Two, "installed" SoftMPU (i.e. copy the executable file) onto that same machine and created simple batch files to "run" SoftMPU for either my MT-32 Rev.0 or SC-88 (haven't tested the MT-32 with any DOS games on that PC yet, but I know it works with my modern PC playing Dune II via Dune Dynasty 😀 ). Have a really short look at the SC-88 (in SC-55 mapped mode) playing MIDI music in Doom and Doom 2.

The resulting MIDI music is sent from the SC-88 into an audio switch, and then from there into the "line in" port of the AWE64 Value in the system.

Also, question: Does Doom 2 support the SC-88 (with all of its extra sounds), or does it only support the SC-55?

Appreciate your setup. Curious as to what model your Dell monitor is, does it do well generally for DOS games via DVI hookup or you just use VGA?

I finally found time to find why my asus 386/33-64k motherboard wouldn't boot completely.
The cyrix fasmath FPU made bad contact between some legs and the socket. Cleaning the legs thoroughly made the board boot again 🤣

Now if only I could find the memory expansion board for it..
Does anybody know if one of the doubleclocked upgrade chips works in the asus 386/33-64k motherboard?

Had to stop my K6-3 build due to missing parts but started 2 Athlon builds 😀 I will pick that one up later on.
I'm having waaaaaay too much hardware 🙁

I had a motherboard that can take a range of 486 CPU's sitting in the cupboard and tonight was its time for a test if it worked I knew it had a bad leaking battery soldered in so I left it in till I knew it worked so I tried a CPU/Ram/Video card without a case it was just sitting on a table as a test bench and no matter what CPU or ram I tried I could not get even a error code beep, every time I changed the CPU I had to change jumpers I even tried different power supplies I almost gave up when I looked in my spare parts cupboard and I found the exact same motherboard that didn't survive the cleaning process from a leaked battery as well and I found the board I couldn't get working was missing a Bios chip so no wonder nothing worked - palm slap to head - I have now removed the battery, used white vinegar to neutralise anything green and cleaned and got rid of most of the water with a hair dryer and its now air drying.

buckeye wrote:

Appreciate your setup. Curious as to what model your Dell monitor is, does it do well generally for DOS games via DVI hookup or you just use VGA?

Thanks. 😀

Well, that monitor, which I use with both my Pentium 3 and 4 systems, is a Dell 1907FP, which, from what I can tell, is a larger 19" variant of the 17" Dell 1707FP (support page: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/pro … 707fpt/research). I got the monitor (along with its original driver CD and an old Pentium 4 Dell PC) from a former teacher when I helped her pull all of her personal files from the Dell PC. While I disassembled the Dell PC and either sold/am selling or threw away its parts, I decided to keep the monitor, and I'm glad I did.

Regarding how I use it, I have it hooked up via VGA to my P3's Voodoo3 3000, and via DVI to my P4's ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. The monitor has a nice little toggle button on the front of it, so, depending on which retro gaming machine I want to use, I select either "analog" (VGA) or "digital" (DVI), and ta-da!, I can switch between them. 😀

While it's a great Windows monitor, I have used it both in MS-DOS mode and with DOS bootdisks, and it works just fine. I might have to use the auto-adjust sometimes with DOS when using its VGA input, because either the display won't line up with the screen perfectly or sometimes it will be way off, but that works 99.99% of the time. If anything were to need any more fine tuning, though, I could manually adjust settings such as the display's horizontal and vertical positions, as well as settings such as pixel clock and phase (the last two I'm not too familiar with; I know though that I had to work with these settings on this other, I think older, VGA-only Samsung monitor, but it has been such a long time that I forgot exactly how these settings impact the display).

If you want to get one yourself, they seem to sell for around $30-ish on the low-end on ebay, from what I see.

fun with oemlogo.bmp

oeuvre wrote:

fun with oemlogo.bmp

Ha, finally some good music here 😎

I built a CMOS battery for my 286 mainboard. I put everything on a small board with a diode attached, against charge protection. I used a SAFT 2450mAH Lithium battery at 3.6V. At the 1uA the CMOS draws, I get a voltage drop of about 0.1V to 3.5V. This should be plenty and last for many years.

Todo: I will print a case and attach it with some velcro in the (to be purchased) case.

Picture:

YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/seCoC2AcHqs

voodoo5_6k wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

fun with oemlogo.bmp

Ha, finally some good music here 😎

HAMMER SMASHED PENTIUM 4

oeuvre wrote:

voodoo5_6k wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

fun with oemlogo.bmp

Ha, finally some good music here 😎

HAMMER SMASHED PENTIUM 4

Incidentally, the only good Pentium 4.

(AthlonXP forever)

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

voodoo5_6k wrote:

Ha, finally some good music here 😎

HAMMER SMASHED PENTIUM 4

Incidentally, the only good Pentium 4.

(AthlonXP forever)

Cue Guns'n'Roses: crack crack cracking on Athlon's core 😵

(mind you, I ran Athlons back in the day too - P4 was overpriced and overheated - but it was with the Athlon64 X2 and later Core2Duo that things really went into high gear)

Went on my first ever thrift store run. Sadly disappointed, haha. I found a copy of The Sims 2: Pets on PC-CD, and a bunch of 15-17" Dell LCD monitors that were all scratched up. No purchases this time. But it was fun seeing weird stuff that people donate for resale.

Wait until fall or winter. You'd be surprised. My thirifting adventures has been slim for a while and some don't take credit cards or their credit card machines are still broken since December. Got a huge haul of computers (2 of them disassembled and in my parts dresser drawer) that needed major work (RAM upgrade, new HDD, new CD-ROM drive), or just minor work (new clock battery, or just a fresh OS install on a perfectly running HDD). PCs I bought at thrift stores (including bidding sites) from 2016-Present:

1) IBM ThinkPad R40 2682 (now has 1GB RAM), Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit
2) HP Pavilion N3350 (goodwill bidding site), no OS presently (HDD is in my Socket 7 machine using the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE kit)
3) Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus, MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 95C (only needed a new battery, and installed/upgraded parts)
4) Dell Dimension 4550 (4 bulged up caps, still works), no OS presently
5) Dell Dimension E510 (had Windows 7 Ultimate, DBAN'd the drive, now has linux)
6) iMac G3/600 (HDD went south as well as the CD drive), replaced the HDD with a 200GB one, slim SuperDrive kit, RAM upgraded to 768MB, and replaced PRAM battery, running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Lubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
7) HP Pavilion 7955 (parted)*
8 ) 2 Commodore 64 (one needs a new RF modulator or logic board for the A/V out only, the other works great and has an aftermarket case)
9) 2 Dell Inspiron 600m laptops (one has issues, no OS due to HDD issues, the other works without problems, running XP Pro SP3) that need better wireless cards (802.11b isn't functioning any longer)
10) iMac G4/800 (re-installed Mac OS X)
11) HP Pavilion A706N (parted)*

* Kept the internals (motherboard, RAM, CPU, I/O backplane, expansion slot covers, internal cards (modems, wireless cards, USB/FireWire cards), HDD, CD-ROM drives, ribbon cables, PSUs)

I got all my caps yesterday, and today, I set about recapping that A4000.

Well, it certainly doesn't work any worse than it did before, as far as I can tell, though I'm not sure if it works any better, either. Maybe two of the Fast RAM SIMMs really are suspect enough that I'll have to just run it with the usual 2 MB of Chip RAM and only 8 MB of Fast RAM. Problem is, I don't have any other 72-pin SIMMs lying around.

It's also a painful reminder that I really need some better gear for SMD soldering, because carefully aligning a capacitor to solder it down with a conventional iron gets rather tedious and requires nerves of steel. I'd normally use the hot air blower on the local makerspace's soldering station, but they don't have a PCB pre-heat platform to set the board on, nor do they seem to have any narrower nozzles I can use for this particular purpose.

One of those ultrasonic cleaners would be great too, just to get all the flux and any traces of alkaline electrolyte and battery fluids off that all my isopropyl alcohol scrubbing may have missed.

At the end of the day, though, it's still a working A4000 that keeps its time after I soldered in a CR2032 holder, saved in the nick of time from being another Varta barrel battery victim.

Not computer related, but an incredible find for our family. Found two very early 16mm color movie film reels from the late 1930s while helping my elderly mother clean up her house. I did not realize film reels came in color that early in the 20th century especially home movie reels. My late grandfather filmed all of it apparently and it will be interesting to see what's on them. I checked a few frames under a light and the film looks to be in good condition. Dropping it off tomorrow to get transferred to digital.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Wait until fall or winter. You'd be surprised. My thirifting adventures has been slim for a while and some don't take credit car […]
Show full quote

Wait until fall or winter. You'd be surprised. My thirifting adventures has been slim for a while and some don't take credit cards or their credit card machines are still broken since December. Got a huge haul of computers (2 of them disassembled and in my parts dresser drawer) that needed major work (RAM upgrade, new HDD, new CD-ROM drive), or just minor work (new clock battery, or just a fresh OS install on a perfectly running HDD). PCs I bought at thrift stores (including bidding sites) from 2016-Present:

1) IBM ThinkPad R40 2682 (now has 1GB RAM), Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit
2) HP Pavilion N3350 (goodwill bidding site), no OS presently (HDD is in my Socket 7 machine using the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE kit)
3) Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus, MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 95C (only needed a new battery, and installed/upgraded parts)
4) Dell Dimension 4550 (4 bulged up caps, still works), no OS presently
5) Dell Dimension E510 (had Windows 7 Ultimate, DBAN'd the drive, now has linux)
6) iMac G3/600 (HDD went south as well as the CD drive), replaced the HDD with a 200GB one, slim SuperDrive kit, RAM upgraded to 768MB, and replaced PRAM battery, running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Lubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
7) HP Pavilion 7955 (parted)*
8 ) 2 Commodore 64 (one needs a new RF modulator or logic board for the A/V out only, the other works great and has an aftermarket case)
9) 2 Dell Inspiron 600m laptops (one has issues, no OS due to HDD issues, the other works without problems, running XP Pro SP3) that need better wireless cards (802.11b isn't functioning any longer)
10) iMac G4/800 (re-installed Mac OS X)
11) HP Pavilion A706N (parted)*

* Kept the internals (motherboard, RAM, CPU, I/O backplane, expansion slot covers, internal cards (modems, wireless cards, USB/FireWire cards), HDD, CD-ROM drives, ribbon cables, PSUs)

Why on earth would you part out working OEM systems? Those aren't customs builds, they are unique designs that will someday be either uncommon or in the case of alot of obscure models entirely gone. I think HP Pavilions are some of the better looking machines that were produced too.

liqmat wrote:

Not computer related, but an incredible find for our family. Found two very early 16mm color movie film reels from the late 1930s while helping my elderly mother clean up her house. I did not realize film reels came in color that early in the 20th century especially home movie reels. My late grandfather filmed all of it apparently and it will be interesting to see what's on them. I checked a few frames under a light and the film looks to be in good condition. Dropping it off tomorrow to get transferred to digital.

16mm1.jpg

16mm2.jpg

My understanding was that no one had developed Kodachrome film since something like 2009?

the_ultra_code wrote:

Well, that monitor, which I use with both my Pentium 3 and 4 systems, is a Dell 1907FP, which, from what I can tell, is a larger 19" variant of the 17" Dell 1707FP (support page: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/pro … 707fpt/research). I got the monitor (along with its original driver CD and an old Pentium 4 Dell PC) from a former teacher when I helped her pull all of her personal files from the Dell PC. While I disassembled the Dell PC and either sold/am selling or threw away its parts, I decided to keep the monitor, and I'm glad I did.

Huh. I've got one of those as the right end of the three-monitor spread for my main machine. It was given to me by a friend because the power button had broken and I didn't know how to solvent weld at the time, so I ended up MacGyvering up a solution by...

1. Drilling a hole over the actual pushbutton
2. Sawing off the top of a clear push pin
3. Cutting a shaped piece of electrical tape to hold it in
4. Using hot glue as a translucent window on the old power button hole.

Also, I found another nostalgic, elegant, and useful shell extension in my old DVD+R backups and uploaded it: Something to add the Registry as one of the namespaces in My Computer.

I'm listening to Van Halen's "5150" on a Dolby HX Pro encoded cassette. This stuff sounds fantastic.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My understanding was that no one had developed Kodachrome film since something like 2009?

The reel is already developed. I am just going to get it transferred to digital as I don't want to risk sticking this into a projector myself. This probably hasn't been viewed in almost 70 years so I am hoping it hasn't degraded deeper into the reel.