Well I got some unplanned retro activity in today. I'm stuck using an EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTX with my main OC'd QX9650 PC that normally holds a GTX 780 Ti. The 780TI quit on me and then my GTX470 which was my backup card failed. I didn't feel like digging out the GTX 285 Black Edition so that was the second most powerful card in my GPU drawer (9800GX2 was in there too but 9 series SLI is broken with the latest DX10 drivers from NV. Studders in every DX10 or OGL rendered game and is horribly in-effecient in DX9).

It's actually doing alright. Im getting 60FPS steady in WarThunder on Minimum settings/1080p. The fact it can still game 12 years after it was built is a testament to the absolute monster of a GPU the 8800 was when it was new.

Just borrowed a Micro 2000 Post Probe card to help diagnose my failing-to-post PCChips M919 v1.4 motherboard. I got the manual too, but this is going to be a learning exercise to figure out. Any tips are welcome.

I also ordered new caps and diodes for the board or any future projects.

Maybe a month ago I bought a 386 motherboard of ebay, it has been featured here before when I was testing the CGA card a while ago. Since I couldn't find the manual or jumper settings anywhere on the Internet I disassembled the test system again and stashed it away. So far so normal. Well only a couple of days later I had a mystery envelope in the mail. To my surprise it contained a pristine copy of the manual for the motherboard! Wrote a message to the seller and sure enough, he found it somewhere while cleaning and instead of just throwing away he went out of his way to send it to me. Didn't even contact me before to try to sell it or ask for me to pay his shipping cost. What a nice guy.

I scanned the manual and uploaded it to archive.org if anybody ever needs it again:
https://archive.org/details/PAT38PI

Well I planned to boot up my 386 and test out both my new MPU-401 clone (thanks keropi & Marmes!) and my new Unicomp Ultra Classic, but instead I was greeted with the dreaded keyboard error 😵 When I got this motherboard several years ago, I removed the leaky battery and attempted to clean up the corrosion... apparently I didn't do well enough. I believe one of the pads for the AT connector is heavily corroded, probably because I wasn't able to get that part really clean back then (I think I was just using q-tips and alcohol 😒 ).

I just finished rinsing that corner of the motherboard in vinegar, then gently brushing it with a toothbrush and 91% iso, then finally rinsing it with iso and distilled water. Hopefully it will work once it dries out... but I might have to attempt repairs, if it's even feasible. I feel like this is how life always goes... I try to improve something, and another problem takes its place and ruins the fun.

Started to open up the 3 PC's I bought this weekend (posted in the appropriate thread with pics 😀)
The first 386 was VERY dusty so I dismantled it as much as I could, cleaned out the PSU and gave it a go. I don't get output from the onboard graphics but maybe it's not VGA. I need to try and identify the model of the board.
With a VGA card in the slot, the thing fired up. External battery is empty after all these years so CMOS error as expected. I will need to look further into this because I can't get this thing to boot after setting up the BIOS. Maybe the drives are broken or the missing battery is causing this?
The second 386, I just opened it up but didn't test it yet. Gonna give the PSU a visual check first.
The 8088 is opened up, PSU cleaned and 'working': the fan turns when I plug it in and turn it on but only when it is not connected to the board. So I will need to dismantle this big boy, give it a good dustoff and look for signs of bad caps and stuff.

The three case lids are pretty shiny now after a good scrub. Still drying as we speak.

Completed and finalised my Tandon AT with Hercules, tested some games (see this thread: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games ), played a bit of Crystals of Arborea.

Already thinking about some other modifications... but at the time being, let's just chill and have some fun with it.

I refuse to call this a "modern activity"!

I'm tinkering with an Asus Striker Extreme nForce 680i motherboard + Q6600 bundle I bought on Ebay.

A few pictues showing the sellers awesome packaging skills...

Yea the board was just thrown into that box with a few pieces of paper on top... Awesome packaging.

Well of course the board diddn't work... The Northbridge and Southbridge were overheating because the heatpipe cooling had gotten dislodged, it wouldn't even POST. After repasting and reinstalling the motherboard cooling the motherboard came to life but it's just as retardedly lousy as my P5N32-E SLI, I should have known as they are 99% identical. Active cooling is needed on the chipset heatsinks even at stock or the board will pretty much overheat and lock up just idling in the BIOS at default settings with a quad core CPU...

Most memory modules wouldn't work at all regardless of memory voltage and the two Corsair XMS2 1GB 800MHz CL 5,5,5,15 sticks that did somewhat work wasn't stable at the default 800 MHz with the Q6600 at stock. I had to use unlinked mode with the memory at 700 MHz to be able to run Frybench... Any overclocking using more than 295 MHz FSB wouldn't even load Windows 10. All in all pretty much exactly what I have come to expect when it comes to Asus nForce 680i offerings in combination with quad core CPUs.

I have now dug up two Crucial Ballistix Tracer Micron D9 1GB sticks and even if they diddn't even POST at the defualt 1.85V = 1.92V upping the voltage to 2.05V = 2.11V actually made them both POST and be stable at 800 MHz 5.5,5,18, progress I guess.

The plan is to replace the Asus P5N32-E SLI in my year 2006 QX6700 + 8800 GTX SLI build as this board is more "correct" in an "over the top build". Not beeing able to overclock using FSB is a non issue but I need to find 4x1GB or 2x2GB memory the board accepts and that will probably take some trial and error as this board seems even more picky when it comes to memory compared to my P5N32-E SLI.

Predator99 wrote:

Therefore I am afraid I still have to find the problem during the serial transmission to get a ADF transfer from the PC working. Maybe I will put a working drive from an A500 and put it in the A500+. If it does not work in the 500+ I will try to copy the transferred file back to the PC and take a look with a Hex-Editor where the Problem is. File size is few bytes to small every time regardless of the settings. When transferring pure text everything looks OK.

Puh, this was a hard one. Finally got this adf over serial transfer running.

Reason Amiga Explorer and the other programs didnt run properly was a Virus on my only workbench disk. This disk had several damaged sectors as additional problem.

Took me hours to find out that this Virus is the root cause. It causes an error with "Amiga explorer" when doing a adf-Transfer. Single file transfer was working.

With "ADF Sender Temrminal" the serial connection was with errors. Therefore also unusable.

Therefore I split a clean WB-ADF into 2 files, transferred them with Amiga Explorer on the RAM-Disk on the AMiga. Then wrote them in 2 parts with "transwarp" on the Amiga. I was surprised this image did not boot...reason was..yes the Virus. I 1st noticed that Virus when I transferred back the disk-image to the PC (which works with Amiga Explorer) and did a comparision with the source file...

So my solution was:
- Found a game disk that is Virus-free and that started into Workbench (but without any program)
- inserted the infected WB-disk and started a terminal
- assigned the serial device to the one on infected WB-disk (as it was not inlcuded on the game disk):
assign devs: workbench1.3:devs
- inserted another disk with the Aexplorer-client (created in the infected system) and started it
- this time the file transfer with "Amiga Explorer" worked and I have a Complete and Virus-free Workbench disk 😎

I did some more tinkering with the Asus Striker Extreme and Q6600.

With insane levels of VTT the board actually managed to reach 1333 MHz FSB with the Q6600! Not at all impressive compared to anything else but at least something! I will declare this a flawless victory and put the board on a shelf until I get to rebuilding the "year 2006 system".

If anyone wonders where all the LED this and LED that originally came from it started with the Crucial Ballistix Tracers sometime late year 2004. The first Ballistix Tracers were DDR1 PC4000 but they were soon followed by a PC5300 DDR2 model. The Asus Striker Extreme (2006) was the first motherboard (I know of) with LEDs all over (it's a bit hard to see in this photo). The pictured memory sticks are Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 PC6400 1GB sticks, probably from about the same time as the motherboard.

spent the weekend and part of today trying to sort my "collection" into manageable bits. Theres just so much stuff I don't really need and it's a shame to bin it all (I won't).

Maybe it's time to start a vogons-in-person-swapmeet somewhere 😉

Retro is relative.

My partner wanted to upgrade her PC after the children had gone to bed. Just two DIMMs and a bigger SSD in her 8-year old Core i3 system. Somehow the system decided to die on her - continual mem errors, even after removing the new RAM and returning to the old setup. This system is heavily used so needed to be up fast. Fortunately my daughter has my old box with an i7 with same P55 motherboard chipset (so no Windows issues) and hers runs Linux which doesn't give a hoot about the motherboard. Also she won't be here for another two weeks. So moved the guts from her system to the dead one, then installed an Athlon64 X2 7750 Black Edition into hers. 1am and everything was back up and running as it should be.

Amazing how an almost 10 year old CPU and system can still be perfectly adequate for most purposes. Back in 1995 the thought of using a 10-year old PC (XT?) would have been horrifying.

dionb wrote:

Amazing how an almost 10 year old CPU and system can still be perfectly adequate for most purposes. Back in 1995 the thought of using a 10-year old PC (XT?) would have been horrifying.

I use systems far older for some jobs. My main PC is a Llano based system, my file server has an i7 6700K, but I do some of my coding on a 486, and will find uses for 808x/Vx0/286 and 386 systems when I receive the cases (in a couple of months). My interest in retro hardware stems from my programming hobby and the desire to write software that will run as efficiently as possible on any x86 system.

Just been gathering the hardware to revive an eBox 2300, with a Vortex86 CPU (SiS 550, based on the Rise mp6). Hoping that I can set up Windows XP on it using a USB CD-ROM drive. When I finish putting everything together, I'll start a thread. Very uncommon SoC, used only in thin client PCs (mine almost fits in my pocket).

dionb wrote:

Back in 1995 the thought of using a 10-year old PC (XT?) would have been horrifying.

As long as it could make a document and could print, it didn't really matter. Common floppy drives and file systems (besides Macs 😠 )also kept it from being a complete loss of practicality.

Yes, you could run WP 4.2 and feed a printer off a 1985-era PC in 1995, but you could not run a modern OS on it, even many DOS applications would refuse to run due to no i386 instructions. And those that did run would be torturously slow due to a factor 20 or so speed delta. Whereas the 2008 system today wil happily run Windows 10, supports all relevant CPU instructions, runs with more than enough RAM (6GB at present) and - depending on application - is at worst 1/3 of the speed of a new CPU per core, so in the same ballpark as a new low-end CPU. An 8088 wasn't even close to the oldest, slowest you could buy in 1995. It would have been thoroughly retro then, whereas many would argue that my AM2+ thing still passes for current.

dionb wrote:

Yes, you could run WP 4.2 and feed a printer off a 1985-era PC in 1995, but you could not run a modern OS on it, even many DOS applications would refuse to run due to no i386 instructions. And those that did run would be torturously slow due to a factor 20 or so speed delta. Whereas the 2008 system today wil happily run Windows 10, supports all relevant CPU instructions, runs with more than enough RAM (6GB at present) and - depending on application - is at worst 1/3 of the speed of a new CPU per core, so in the same ballpark as a new low-end CPU. An 8088 wasn't even close to the oldest, slowest you could buy in 1995. It would have been thoroughly retro then, whereas many would argue that my AM2+ thing still passes for current.

We ran Professional Write on XTs and printed on Lexmark dot matrix printers in 1994.

A little more cleaning. Kind of had to limit myself because I had rehab today and if I do too much I crash.

The prior owners didn't know the meaning of the word "clean."

The drive is interesting (for me, because I never used to work with SCSI). It's kind of a 3/4 height 3.5" HD.

Believe it or not this floppy:

is now working and clean, and I didn't break anything. That was another drive.

Obligatory PC content:

Wasn't working when I got it, the 3.5" lights up and spins up at start, but doesn't respond otherwise. Sadly, because I always wanted one of these back in the day.

dionb wrote:

Yes, you could run WP 4.2 and feed a printer off a 1985-era PC in 1995, but you could not run a modern OS on it, even many DOS applications would refuse to run due to no i386 instructions. And those that did run would be torturously slow due to a factor 20 or so speed delta. Whereas the 2008 system today wil happily run Windows 10, supports all relevant CPU instructions, runs with more than enough RAM (6GB at present) and - depending on application - is at worst 1/3 of the speed of a new CPU per core, so in the same ballpark as a new low-end CPU. An 8088 wasn't even close to the oldest, slowest you could buy in 1995. It would have been thoroughly retro then, whereas many would argue that my AM2+ thing still passes for current.

I would almost say the gap between 1990 and 2000 is greater than between 1985 & '95. In 1990 you had a 386 (or maybe a really early 486) with 2MB RAM, DOS & Windows 3.0. In 2000 you could have had a GHz machine (if you were baller) with a real GPU, Windows, well, 2000, a broadband internet connection, easy online multiplayer gaming, a pocket mp3 player and a cell phone. 😜

1996-97 is when the full-on progress rush started and it was already losing steam by 2004. It was a really intense few years. I think that's why so many of us fixate on those years as a high point in computing.

appiah4 wrote:

dionb wrote:

Yes, you could run WP 4.2 and feed a printer off a 1985-era PC in 1995, but you could not run a modern OS on it, even many DOS applications would refuse to run due to no i386 instructions. And those that did run would be torturously slow due to a factor 20 or so speed delta. Whereas the 2008 system today wil happily run Windows 10, supports all relevant CPU instructions, runs with more than enough RAM (6GB at present) and - depending on application - is at worst 1/3 of the speed of a new CPU per core, so in the same ballpark as a new low-end CPU. An 8088 wasn't even close to the oldest, slowest you could buy in 1995. It would have been thoroughly retro then, whereas many would argue that my AM2+ thing still passes for current.

We ran Professional Write on XTs and printed on Lexmark dot matrix printers in 1994.

When I was a student at the Technical University of Łódź (pronounced "Woodge") in 2001 we've been calculating air viscosity and other variables for fluid mechanics on Amstrad-Schneider CPC 6128 in a lab. So, yes, you could make really old hardware useful. But I wouldn't really say it is/was a common thing.