Nothing much today. Just updated the BIOS on my Asus TUSL2-C motherboard, and tested the other PIII-S 1266MHz I had as well.

kixs wrote:

Make a hole:

Use a paperclip, straighten it, use a lighter to heat the end of the paperclip. When hot just push it in the connector to make a hole.

I'll try this later. Although, I already got the new floppy cables today, hence why I was able to update the BIOS today.

So I'm trying to get started on this Zeos 386 laptop whose power supply's cable was chewed by rats:

Which is pretty bad. The cable is an 8-pin DIN which I initially meant to replace with a CAT 5 cable, because 8 conductors and handy,
so I grabbed a Cat 5 cable out of a box and cut the ends off and...

What jackanapery is this? No wonder that cable was free. So anyway looking at the connector I think I'm planning to buy another
connector because the old one is a bit corroded outside. I have to wait for my new multimeter to arrive (hopefully, the last seller
canceled the sale) to both verify where the cables go in the connector and test the power supply after I fix it.

CN52 is the power cable, which despite *looking* like a plug is in fact soldered to the board, the plastic end is literally just a
sleeve. It almost looks like it was intended to have each wire pulled out individually, but they seem to be soldered down in the
plastic base.

Hopefully when I get to the point where I can test the PS, and I pop open the laptop for cleaning and testing, I won't find any
grossly melted CMOS batteries or dead animals or anything. I'm also thinking of repairing the battery, I did that once with a
portable DVD player.

Merovign wrote:

SteveC wrote:

Just trying out a few OSes on an old IGEL thin client (VIA Nano U3500 @ 1GHz, 1GB RAM and a 44pin IDE->SD card adapter as I only […]
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Just trying out a few OSes on an old IGEL thin client (VIA Nano U3500 @ 1GHz, 1GB RAM and a 44pin IDE->SD card adapter as I only have 1GB CF cards). I will have access to loads of these soon as we're replacing them all at work 😀
DOS worked a treat, but of course no audio - the Via chipset doesn't have DOS drivers (well none that I can find work). Trying XP now! Using Easy2boot to install XP and it seems to be working.

igel.PNG

xpinst.PNG

I assume you tried one of the "AC97 DOS" drivers floating around, like DOSsound? IIRC the IGEL VIA machines had the 855 sound chipset, which is not very well-supported, but is said to be basically a repackaged, low-power older VIA chipset.

A lot of times, compatibility is frustratingly *just* out of reach.

Yeah and it just says it can't detect the sound card. Same in Windows 98 I can't get it to work 🙁

Merovign wrote:

So I'm trying to get started on this Zeos 386 laptop whose power supply's cable was chewed by rats: […]
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So I'm trying to get started on this Zeos 386 laptop whose power supply's cable was chewed by rats:

ZeosPS-2.jpg

Which is pretty bad. The cable is an 8-pin DIN which I initially meant to replace with a CAT 5 cable, because 8 conductors and handy,
so I grabbed a Cat 5 cable out of a box and cut the ends off and...

ZeosPS-3.jpg

What jackanapery is this? No wonder that cable was free. So anyway looking at the connector I think I'm planning to buy another
connector because the old one is a bit corroded outside. I have to wait for my new multimeter to arrive (hopefully, the last seller
canceled the sale) to both verify where the cables go in the connector and test the power supply after I fix it.

ZeosPS-1.jpg

CN52 is the power cable, which despite *looking* like a plug is in fact soldered to the board, the plastic end is literally just a
sleeve. It almost looks like it was intended to have each wire pulled out individually, but they seem to be soldered down in the
plastic base.

Hopefully when I get to the point where I can test the PS, and I pop open the laptop for cleaning and testing, I won't find any
grossly melted CMOS batteries or dead animals or anything. I'm also thinking of repairing the battery, I did that once with a
portable DVD player.

Ah that's a 10/100mbps only cable. Often get them included with broadband routers etc.

Been documenting on what motherboards I can find that use the same chips (almost) as my Jetway J-7BXAN so I can use the BIOS from them.

So far I've found the DTK-PRM-0080i to be a close match (Winbond W83977EF SIO, Winbond clockgen chips), but for some reason the BIOS will simply not work. I've triple checked the chips on my Jetway, and they ALL match the DTK.

Also, I had some help. 🤣

I don't think that help is very... helpful, unless you want cupcakes.

Yesterday I got this super duper nice beast to my Siemens Nixdorf collection.

It came with no floppy drive and harddrive, so I have to replace them both.
Had some issues with setting it up, but that was just because I didn't obey the original poster with specs - originaly it came either with WD Caviar 2120 or 2200 and the BIOS has a logical cap lying on 528MB mark, but at the time I didn't know that and tried to install 2,6GB drive.

It was not working quite happily (haha) until I turned it off and tried to search for solution. Five minutes later the PSU turned into cloud of A HORRIBLE smell.

Welp, the X2/Y2 suppresion cap combo just decided to go flying to hell on its fiery, cloudy and smelly way.

I know it is not necessarily needed, but I will replace it anyway since I am so much thrilled about having this machine - it is super duper nice and cool, I LOVE IT! 😁

Well I didn't do much today, but yesterday, I worked with a ThinkPad T22, one with the nice 1440x1050 LCD. I'm using it as a retro MS-DOS/Windows gaming laptop, so I set up Windows 98 Second Edition with some games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and to round off the list, a Windows game, Unreal Tournament. I plan to add the first three Quake games, and Starcraft to round off the FPSes. The CPU (900MHz P-III) is nice and speedy and 256MB of memory helps with the system. While in DOS mode, sound (Sound Blaster / General MIDI) doesn't work, Windows emulates it, so I get sound under DOS games in Windows.

I plan to continue using this as a retro MS-DOS/Windows gaming laptop and it will complement other machines and I get desktop computers and older laptops (Compaq LTE 5xxx, maybe). The nice thing about the IBM ThinkPad is it has a serial port for multiplayer. I had better install the drivers for that pesky PCI Serial Controller...

krivulak wrote:

Yesterday I got this super duper nice beast to my Siemens Nixdorf collection. […]
Show full quote

Yesterday I got this super duper nice beast to my Siemens Nixdorf collection.

P_20180831_184347.jpg

It came with no floppy drive and harddrive, so I have to replace them both.
Had some issues with setting it up, but that was just because I didn't obey the original poster with specs - originaly it came either with WD Caviar 2120 or 2200 and the BIOS has a logical cap lying on 528MB mark, but at the time I didn't know that and tried to install 2,6GB drive.

P_20180901_194142.jpg

It was not working quite happily (haha) until I shat it off and tried to search for solution. Five minutes later the PSU turned into cloud of A HORRIBLE smell.

P_20180901_195615.jpg

Welp, the X2/Y2 suppresion cap combo just decided to go flying to hell on its fiery, cloudy and smelly way.

P_20180901_210825.jpg

I know it is not necessarily needed, but I will replace it anyway since I am so much thrilled about having this machine - it is super duper nice and cool, I LOVE IT! 😁

You can replace the IEC jack with an integrated filter can, assuming you have the space.

Built this machine for a friend who wants to do some Win98 gaming. I was just trying to throw as many spare parts as possible into a box in order to get them out of my space, but I actually ended up making something decent:

^^ I was missing two slot covers, and the original ones are an odd shape & not very generic, so this is what I came up with. I think it looks pretty good. I used the black DVD drive on purpose.

Intel D815EEA (Gateway OEM)
PIII/733 (133 FSB)
256MB PC133 CL2
GeForce 4 MX440
SB Audigy 2
Asus NEC USB2 card (should work in 98)
DEC 10/100 ethernet
Adaptec 29160 UW SCSI (PCI-X card in a 32-bit slot)
Dual-layer DVD+/-RW drive
Working FDD 😉

Yeah, I would have been pretty stoked to have this back in the day.

^^ Had to leave this sticker on the back of the case. Who remembers these guys? Ahahaha.

Formatted the HDD in the CBW Diplomat PC for Windows 98SE (I checked the AGP Aperture size settings in the BIOS and it goes up to 1G (1GB), which is rare to see that on that motherboard), and tested the GeForce 6200 after letting it set for a couple of weeks, and, it's back to the artifact stage again after I put a fan on top of the GPU. Another note, I installed the 3 5" floppy drive and multi-card reader into the CBW system and the system refused to turn on, but, it turned on after disconnecting the floppy power cable (don't know if the PSU is bad or if the floppy is causing a short).

Also tested a theory for hooking up the 10GB HDD to the secondary controller on my Packard Bell and no more compatibility mode after that, but, the CD drive on the primary channel wasn't detected and my ribbon cable is too short (might get a longer cable). In other words, I'm getting closer.

I took the old Amstrad PC2086 out of storage to mess around with, discovered the CF card had corrupted so installed DOS 5 along with the soundblaster drivers again. Got it up and running just fine but I really should retrobright it, it's got that really bad smokers yellow look to it. Messed around with Zeliard for a bit, I kind of want to have a proper go at beating it.

Also picked up a Tiny 810ls1 desktop for £2 at the local car boot. I just wanted something to play some late 90s games on while I gather parts for a true replacement but when I turned it on my monitor wouldn't give an image just like with my Dell. I feel a bit stumped here, the monitor works fine with my Amstrad but can't give an image with either the Dell or the Tiny. Maybe both computers are knackered but I'm starting to think it's the monitor. Unfortunately I don't have anything else with a VGA port to test that just now, I'm going to hunt for something cheap this week.

I really hope the monitor is OK, it's a Dell Trinitron I got for pennies in 2011. It's served me well for a long time now and decent replacement CRTs seem hard to come by.

Discovered that using badblocks to test HDDs is pretty CPU-intensive and that four simultaneous instances on an HPT370 controller can bring a P3-700E to its knees.

I have a large backlog of IDE drives to test, mainly in the 4-120GB range. Today I got a nice mobo with extra controller, so time to process this stuff.

First test was to see if the machine would boot with the drives and if it did if it would recognize them. Half the sample - including all but one of the Maxtor Diamondmax 8 through 10 drives in the batch - failed that first one. Most spectacular (and easiest to spot) was an IBM Deskstar (not the 75GXP) with click-of-death. Then briefly fired up badblocks to spot instant failures. That rooted out the last Diamondmax too. All the Seagate, Quantum and WD drives passed though. Now they''re all on a full badblocks run.

Not much I can do for the next 12h or so I guess, so I'll just let them run.

kixs wrote:

root42... It's a paperclip and it's long. When heating one end the other doesn't get hot. I use this all the time since I don't know when. Paperclip should be the bigger one as the width of the pin matches it's width.

Ah, good to know. I have some copper plated paper clips. And I would have guessed that they conduct heat very well. Will keep this trick in mind.

liqmat wrote:

About half way through a 286-12 cleanup. Found this one in a large lot on Craigslist. Out of the ten machines in the lot, this is the only one I was after. Have been cleaning it since yesterday.

Lovely board and lovely case! What do you do about the old PSUs? I am always a bit afraid of them breaking down.

Spent some time configuring PCem to simulate a 286 with SCAT chipset, 2MB memory and 152MB HDD then installed DOS 6.22 on it, used QRAM to enable UMBs and activated expanded memory with SCATEMM.SYS, then loaded mouse and CD drivers in that tasty upper memory. All that so I can test some games. Waste of time in the end because it turns out they required a 386 CPU. That's OK I'll find some use for that simulated machine eventually. Played some Elite Plus on it after that.

I was recently being given a SiS 486G 3.3/5V Rev E motherboard.

Unfortunately, the cache on it was fake and soldered onto the mobo. So I took my desoldering iron, desoldered these piece of shit, then I took a dead PCChips m912 motherboard (which surprisingly had real cache on sockets) and I desoldered the sockets to put them on the new motherboard.

Once the transplantation was done, benchmarks showed that the L2 cache was working ^^

Now I'm going to socket the BIOS chip (which is soldered as well), add the missing transistor to get 3.3V vcore (for some reasons they didn't bother to put that component) and finally to replace the battery (which fortunately have been removed by the previous owner so there is almost zero damages, just 5-6 corroded vias and a one trace).

By the way, apparently the motherboard could came with either an AWARD bios or an AMI bios. My board comes with the AWARD bios. I'm looking for the AMI bios rom because I find the AWARD one kinda lacking ...

Deksor wrote:

I was recently being given a SiS 486G 3.3/5V Rev E motherboard. […]
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I was recently being given a SiS 486G 3.3/5V Rev E motherboard.

Unfortunately, the cache on it was fake and soldered onto the mobo. So I took my desoldering iron, desoldered these piece of shit, then I took a dead PCChips m912 motherboard (which surprisingly had real cache on sockets) and I desoldered the sockets to put them on the new motherboard.

Once the transplantation was done, benchmarks showed that the L2 cache was working ^^

Now I'm going to socket the BIOS chip (which is soldered as well), add the missing transistor to get 3.3V vcore (for some reasons they didn't bother to put that component) and finally to replace the battery (which fortunately have been removed by the previous owner so there is almost zero damages, just 5-6 corroded vias and a one trace).

By the way, apparently the motherboard could came with either an AWARD bios or an AMI bios. My board comes with the AWARD bios. I'm looking for the AMI bios rom because I find the AWARD one kinda lacking ...

I love that - using a PCChips motherboard to provide REAL cache for a fake board! Irony overload 😀

Absolutely x)

But that board is better : thicker PCB, better thicker overall quality, proper labels on the chipset (which is an SiS 471). Really what's lacking is few components (battery, cache and regulator). It will become a very decent mobo once all of this is replaced !

root42 wrote:

liqmat wrote:

About half way through a 286-12 cleanup. Found this one in a large lot on Craigslist. Out of the ten machines in the lot, this is the only one I was after. Have been cleaning it since yesterday.

Lovely board and lovely case! What do you do about the old PSUs? I am always a bit afraid of them breaking down.

Luckily on this beast the PSU is in mint condition, but I always take the PSU completely apart and do a full cleaning and inspection before turning it on. From the looks of this system it was kept mostly in a climate controlled environment as there were only three tiny rust spots on the metal case internally which I dissolved, scrubbed and primered. once I get all the boards back in it and MS-DOS installed I'll take some more pics. I just hope that MFM drive still has some life in it. We shall see.