sunbrightened works but depending on the case it may last only one year or less, depends on how bad the plastics are degraded. Some last 5+ years....

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-06, 04:11:

Been screwing around with a crappy socket A board, KM133 MSI OEM maybe was in a Packard Hell. Got to where it starts "picking me lottery numbers" on the POST card, i.e. different error every boot. I wasted an hour and a half digging out my old posts here to see if I mentioned how I cured similar symptom on a CUV4X the other year.... and I guess I didn't, thought that one might have been a scrambled/bad BIOS. It might have to go on the pile of "When I get chips and/or a programmer" for now. Could need caps but they look great, any other MSI I pulled the KZEs on of same age, they checked out fine.

Update... a 3rd different RAM stick tried and I have the POST screen w00t. This was after 2 different CPUs and 2 PSUs 🤣 ... weirdly it was giving "total deadness" vibes when no RAM inserted, then after CPU change was doing the "lottery numbers" picking, but no RAM codes, it should have been giving me RAM codes dammit... unless it didn't support the refresh type on those DRAMs or something super esoteric. Though I noticed I may have missed a clue, because although it was giving me a lot of crap it did report it could not initialise the display adapter 2 or 3 times in there. Now, I was just trying the onboard cyber fleem delta sheen or whatever, and I guess it could not initialise because it couldn't allocate RAM. Not having the penny drop yet, I stuck an AGP card in there and got more randomness.

I thought that RAM I was using at first was good though. Sometimes I wonder if it's sheer force of will that brings boards up, or dotting all the "i"s crossing all the "t"s or some variation of just showing the board you're not a n00b lightweight to be messed around with. Pre-threatening them with the giant soldering iron used to put the fear of .... me .. into them, maybe should start doing that again.

Anyway, that's an extra gotcha to note with onboard graphics boards, if complain about display adapter, think about where or if it's getting it's display buffer.

Though the board has been "kicking around" for years, it's possible it took enough CPU and RAM changes to scrape the oxide off the sockets.

So, back to a bit more fiddling with the dumb thing...

Laser wrote on 2023-08-06, 11:52:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-08-05, 13:12:

Today is a good day to sunbright my 286..

sunbright for yellowed plastics is a myth /joke spread by some idiots, it does not work

what really works is Hydrogen peroxide , both in cream, or liquid

Ok, you keep doing that then 😀

Laser wrote on 2023-08-06, 21:44:

sunbright alone does not bleach nothing, it does not work, it was a joke done by some youtuber which lot of them spread such cra […]
Show full quote

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-08-06, 18:37:

Both involve bleaching via solar radiation, so it does work. It's just a question of whether it's a good idea insofar as yellowing returning over time and potentially degrading the plastic.

sunbright alone does not bleach nothing, it does not work, it was a joke done by some youtuber which lot of them spread such crap without testing
this crap end up in an urban myth
fact is if you expose any yellowed plastic to the sun it will end up more yellowed and damaged by the heat if you expose it in a hot summer day

just expose any useless yellowed mouse to the sunbright then you will see

I read that there is a difference in how solar radiation affects plastics that are outside versus those that occur after it is filtered through a glass window. Something about certain wavelengths being blocked, and that it's the remaining wavelengths that pass through that cause the yellowing.

Laser wrote on 2023-08-06, 11:52:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-08-05, 13:12:

Today is a good day to sunbright my 286..

sunbright for yellowed plastics is a myth /joke spread by some idiots, it does not work

what really works is Hydrogen peroxide , both in cream, or liquid

Both work, as in temporarily bleaching the yellowed plastics.
Neither actually fix the underlying issue of degrading ABS plastics.

The only "permanent" color fix is painting, and even then, it's unknown what happens to the plastics.
The lack of access to oxygen may stop further brittleness, or maybe the chemicals in the paint exacerbates the brittleness.

In the long run, who cares what people do with their own stuff?
Calling others idiots over this is very, very silly, and you should feel silly.

Several years ago I used Arctic Silver Thermal Epoxy, the stuff that's totally permanent, to attach a Socket-7 heatsink to the northbridge chip of an MSI 875P Neo.
I had big plans for this late P4 motherboard, but then I discovered I didn't like it, and aborted the project.

Anyway, yesterday I grabbed this board off the shelf. To my surprise the heatsink was loose in the bag.

Huh. I guess it wasn't permanent after all.

I remember playing with the weight I put on it while the epoxy was curing, and I think the heatsink moved a little - but I thought it was solid. The 10 year test says otherwise.
It's an oversized heatsink and I guess it got pushed against.

Haven't tested the board but I think the chipset is undamaged. I just need to pick the epoxy off it now. Might use sandpaper if I have to.
It's a good thing it wasn't adhered strongly enough to rip the chip apart. Somebody had a picture of that happening recently.

I have been putting my computer station back together finally after the desk upgrades, there's still much work left to do but if I really want I can play around with a 286, 386, 486, NexGen, Pentium and a P2 ~

I had to make a number of exactly in length LAN cables, turned out the ones I already got were all too short. In the end it was for the better, less cable clutter this way. Sound is another challenge that is to be overcome eventually, also involving custom cables and a homemade mixer with ground loop cancellation features ~

There's still way to go until hardware stuff gets done again but that is slowly shaping up too. Storage is still a major hurdle and lot of stuff still has to stay in boxes and only come out very temporarily...

Are they all hooked up to a KVM switch? Will you use a mixer for audio?

Bonus Question: Where do you put your feet 🤣

This is good news Tiido! You need a place to work your magic 👍

appiah4 wrote on 2023-08-07, 11:57:

Bonus Question: Where do you put your feet 🤣

What, you don't use the smaller cases as footrests..?

All goes to a KVM, two even since there's a test computer too that is being set up behind the monitors. It is a PIII mobo where random stuff will be easy to test ~

Mixer is going to be self built out of a dead EQ with 20 sliders in front, for 10x stereo channels without swapping out the sliders for stereo ones.

Feet go under my ass, as they always have, and as mentioned the computers can support them too 🤣

Today i tried to bring back this Highscreen Laptop 8100 back to life.
After i removed the leaking battery and took care of the damage i could try to start it.
The first thing it did was smoking... because a tantalum cap exploded with nice purple smoke...
The screen seems to be damaged, and the memory of the graphics card is broken.
It tries to work and even counts all 8MB of SIPP memory fine, but not very well with corrupted graphics.
Even if i can replace the video memory, the broken screen remains. And its just a slow 386...
The case is not very nice too. It was only held together with 5 Screws and the lid of the monitor is a different colour. The eject button of the floppy is missing etc...
The best thing is the super awesome mechanical keyboard wich still feels brilliant.

Im thinking about repairing the graphics card and sell off the internals. Then i want to use the really huge case to build a "modernish" pc inside of it and replace the monitor with something not broken and in colour.

What do you think?

BTW: I dumped the BIOS (2 chips) and VGA BIOS (1 chip). If somebody is interested in these files, please let me know.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-08-03, 18:08:

First time converted 4x1MB 30pin SIMMs into SIPPs. […]
Show full quote

First time converted 4x1MB 30pin SIMMs into SIPPs.

I have this beautiful 286 board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/cdtek-286-turbo
And it requires either chips or SIPPs. It did have 1MB in chips. But now, it is upgraded into 4MB. Crazy amount for 286!

I also have 287 @ 6MHz with it.

There's something weird going on with this board. FDD and everything else works, but it is unable to boot from my 512MB CF card. With floppy boot, i can browse through directories, but if i try to execute any program from "HDD", it's going to fail.
I wonder, if the CF card is somehow incompatible with this board? (Would be first time for this solution)
I tried multiple Super-IO controllers, i tried even XT-IDE - nothing is capable of booting from HDD. 🙁

How do they call this pinheaders?

Robin4 wrote on 2023-08-08, 00:52:

How do they call this pinheaders?

I know them as "precision" pin headers...

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-07, 02:23:

Update... a 3rd different RAM stick tried and I have the POST screen w00t. This was after 2 different CPUs and 2 PSUs lol ... we […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-06, 04:11:

Been screwing around with a crappy socket A board, KM133 MSI OEM maybe was in a Packard Hell. Got to where it starts "picking me lottery numbers" on the POST card, i.e. different error every boot. I wasted an hour and a half digging out my old posts here to see if I mentioned how I cured similar symptom on a CUV4X the other year.... and I guess I didn't, thought that one might have been a scrambled/bad BIOS. It might have to go on the pile of "When I get chips and/or a programmer" for now. Could need caps but they look great, any other MSI I pulled the KZEs on of same age, they checked out fine.

Update... a 3rd different RAM stick tried and I have the POST screen w00t. This was after 2 different CPUs and 2 PSUs 🤣 ... weirdly it was giving "total deadness" vibes when no RAM inserted, then after CPU change was doing the "lottery numbers" picking, but no RAM codes, it should have been giving me RAM codes dammit... unless it didn't support the refresh type on those DRAMs or something super esoteric. Though I noticed I may have missed a clue, because although it was giving me a lot of crap it did report it could not initialise the display adapter 2 or 3 times in there. Now, I was just trying the onboard cyber fleem delta sheen or whatever, and I guess it could not initialise because it couldn't allocate RAM. Not having the penny drop yet, I stuck an AGP card in there and got more randomness.

I thought that RAM I was using at first was good though. Sometimes I wonder if it's sheer force of will that brings boards up, or dotting all the "i"s crossing all the "t"s or some variation of just showing the board you're not a n00b lightweight to be messed around with. Pre-threatening them with the giant soldering iron used to put the fear of .... me .. into them, maybe should start doing that again.

Anyway, that's an extra gotcha to note with onboard graphics boards, if complain about display adapter, think about where or if it's getting it's display buffer.

Though the board has been "kicking around" for years, it's possible it took enough CPU and RAM changes to scrape the oxide off the sockets.

So, back to a bit more fiddling with the dumb thing...

Well now I feel like a shrub on a flat-top... premature declaration of victory... it's still flaky as hell. Seems more likely to get to POST screen when off for a while... went sniping with freezer spray and thought I'd narrowed it down... but then it became not repeatable.... and I'm getting too much condensation today to keep at it. Might whack a couple of capacitors on it if I have any matches in the stash. I was thinking earlier that I might replace the one between AGP and Northbridge (MS-6340) as the pic on RetroWeb and a few others for sale used on a search are showing it bulged and leaky. Mine looks fine, but it looks like that one is usually the first to go, the most hammered, so I'll play the odds. Would make sense of the randomness if the northbridge is getting glitched.

Yesterday I've done some cleaning / tests on my retro rigs.

Found out that my 386SX build didn't show any video output: I've solved by moving the video card to another ISA slot; maybe the previous one went faulty, which by the way isn't too much of a problem as I have no plan to install additional cards.

I've also tested MIDI playback on my PMMX build, with the Roland SC-55, on Windows 95.

I'm adding a Not-A-Varta to my boards that a) have no BAT_EXT header b) are currently in a case. Fun times!

Question: Despite the diode I am reading a 0.02V charging voltage when powered on, I don't think that would cause issues for a CR2032, no?

I've have a Varta to CR2032 installed on my 386 board for a while now. No explosions so far!

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :

I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

Tiido wrote on 2023-08-08, 10:39:

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 : IMG_4543.jpg I replaced all these little blue drops with something el […]
Show full quote

Speaking of explosions, I had that happen too to the 486 :
IMG_4543.jpg
I replaced all these little blue drops with something else, and hopefully the ones on the motherboard itself will not start going out like this anytime soon 🤣
The PSU immediately went into protection so that probably saved me from having a whole lot more fallout to deal with...

Can you define "something else"?
Did you replace them with new tantalums or really "something else"?