Today I managed to sift through a bunch of ATi Mach 64 and Rage IIC PCI cards at the local recycler before getting their other 5160 up and running, well, up to the point of asking for boot media. I don't have spare floppies for everything just yet.

I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out what I actually want to do with some of my windows hardware. I no longer have an XP machine, and haven't put together my 98SE machine in a year. I have a good friend who's been wanting to put something together for himself using a slot 1 board, and I have really been considering sending him my Slot 1 motherboard so that he can start with a known good one. This has made me think about what I could do to get something more interesting than my current machine. I kind of want to do something with my 1.2GHz Tualatin-S, but motherboards that support them seem to be stupid expensive now.

Two things I was waiting on arrived today, a Slot A Athlon and a Voodoo3. It meant I could finally test my 'new old stock' Gigabyte motherboard, as well as the new arrivals. Looking good so far!!

Well technically it's not just today. But it made me smile about my own stupidity, so hear me out.

I got an CF to IDE adapter, it came in last tuesday. I didn't have a CF card, so yesterday I went out to find one.
Nothing in the thrift store, nothing in a camera shop, but there is this small computer shop whith a very friendly fellow and his wife running the shop and they have never let me down.
So I went there and he was like: "CF card? Yes, I bought a bunch a few years ago...should be somewhere around here..." His wife rummages around and finds ten of them, all new and all 2GB.
Awesome, so I bought one, asked him to never throw those away and went home.

I had noticed my adapter was for 2.5" , however, I knew I had an adapter to 3,5" in my box of stuff. So far so good!
Tested the CF card on my main pc: works fine. So let's hook it up to the P2B and see what happens!
Oh wait... what's this? My CF adapter has less pins then my 2,5" to 3,5" adapter? Well, let's just make sure pin1 goes to pin1 and who knows, right?
Well, obviously, that doesn't work. Lesson learned, I need a 2,5" 40 pin to 3,5" 44 pin adapter. Luckily, I could order one that came in today, so hurray for modern times!

Mail man came by, unpacked the adapter, connected everything, anticipation.... nothing. Autodetect says no.
Checked master - slave, connected it the other way around, still nothing.
Went on vogons, searched and found things about HD Block mode, so fiddled with that: nothing.
Connect the CF adapter with a 'single' band connector (so no master - slave): nothing.
Searched some more, fiddled some more... nothing.
And then it hit me:

The card was upside down.

Works like a charm, and I had a good laugh about it.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-04-02, 02:34:

The very small bummer about this is that the Tyan board doesn't have a front USB port while the Soyo one does.

I'm dealing with this too. Switching from an A-Trend 440ZX AT board to a Asus P2B-B 440BX board, since the latter supports more RAM and has a few more nice features in the BIOS. The former had 2x USB 1.0 headers so I could use a card reader and USB 1.0 port on the front. The Asus board has a combo USB + PS/2 MIR header instead which I fortunately have the expansion card for. Thinking about ditching it and wiring directly to the MIR port to keep my front panel intact...

Another idea for you though - I have two SiiG and Adaptec USB 2.0 cards that have an internal USB 2.0 port. The SiiG has 4x in the back and 1x internal, Adaptec card has 5x in the back and 1x internal, but disables one port if you enable the internal port, so they're effectively the same and both are NEC chips.

Anyway, you can get these pretty inexpensively that convert the port to a header so you could get one of these cards, this cable, and then have at least one internal header again for your front panel. Or splice up your own if you'd rather.

1pc Motherboard Header Dupont IDC 5-Pin to USB 2.0 A Male Extender Adapter Cable - https://www.ebay.com/itm/304356081710

PD2JK wrote on 2024-04-02, 20:01:

Finally some working 256k SRAM chips and got this message at the POST, just wonderful to see this line: […]
Show full quote

Finally some working 256k SRAM chips and got this message at the POST, just wonderful to see this line:

DSC_8633.JPG

Crammed in the DTK board:
DSC_8634.JPG

Looks good. 😁
DSC_8635.JPG

The 256K cache looks great with the Overdrive! Love the nice emerald green PCB color too.

More testing on the mobile Athlon XP 2600+ from this post on the golden Soltek mobo, as well as tested a few different HDDs on it. (1TB Sun Microsystems OEM Hitachi @ PDC20376 controller, and a few 160, 200 and 300GB HDDs.)

Runs surprisingly good, though I kinda have to attribute that to the ADATA and PQI Turbo sticks as well. Great RAM sticks.

FSB is set to 133, 16x multi - 2138MHz (2.13GHz or so?) speed, I think that's roughly around a standard 3200+. Nice. I still get the "Unknown CPU type" but that's likely the BIOS not having the microcode information for anything else besides the standard speed chips. (like 2500,2800,3200+ etc.)

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-04-02, 02:47:

Maybe it was arcing on the power rail. I also noticed that these interposer Tualatins are not a very deep fit.

It is still possible to replace the socket, if that's all it is.

It seems to be fine with the Coppermine 1000. I've now installed both Win98 and Windows 2000 on the board with no issues. After trying the modified Tualatin in the Tyan board, it worked just fine, but that board had no overclocking options at all (the CMOS settings are pretty sparse), where the Soyo board has a fair number of options including overclocking and adjustable CPU voltage. With the Tyan and the Tualatin running at the stock speed of 1,266 I was able to tweak the sytem until it scored 8,000 points in 3D Mark 2001. With the Soyo board I was able to overclock the Coppermine until it was within 250 points (all else the same, 100 MHz lower speed and half the L2). I was able to overclock the Tualatin in the Soyo to nearly 1.4 GHz and it had scored significantly higher. Also, the hard drive speed (as measured with ATTO) on the Soyo is significantly faster than the Tyan I suppose because the Tyan has a 596B southbridge and the Soyo has a 686B.

Fixing the Soyo so that it will again work with the Tualatin is definitely the goal. There is one weird thing about this board - it seems to only work with one stick of RAM. If I have more than one stick of RAM, I will get errors on Memtest. The same RAM will pass Memtest if it is the only stick. Two known good sticks of PC133, both will pass alone, but put them together and there will be errors. It isn't a huge issue since I can run one known good stick of 512 in the number one slot and it's fine, but I ran into this because I wanted to add more memory for Windows 2000.

Cosmic wrote on 2024-04-04, 21:23:

I'm dealing with this too. Switching from an A-Trend 440ZX AT board to a Asus P2B-B 440BX board, since the latter supports more […]
Show full quote

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-04-02, 02:34:

The very small bummer about this is that the Tyan board doesn't have a front USB port while the Soyo one does.

I'm dealing with this too. Switching from an A-Trend 440ZX AT board to a Asus P2B-B 440BX board, since the latter supports more RAM and has a few more nice features in the BIOS. The former had 2x USB 1.0 headers so I could use a card reader and USB 1.0 port on the front. The Asus board has a combo USB + PS/2 MIR header instead which I fortunately have the expansion card for. Thinking about ditching it and wiring directly to the MIR port to keep my front panel intact...

Another idea for you though - I have two SiiG and Adaptec USB 2.0 cards that have an internal USB 2.0 port. The SiiG has 4x in the back and 1x internal, Adaptec card has 5x in the back and 1x internal, but disables one port if you enable the internal port, so they're effectively the same and both are NEC chips.

Anyway, you can get these pretty inexpensively that convert the port to a header so you could get one of these cards, this cable, and then have at least one internal header again for your front panel. Or splice up your own if you'd rather.

1pc Motherboard Header Dupont IDC 5-Pin to USB 2.0 A Male Extender Adapter Cable - https://www.ebay.com/itm/304356081710

In a PCChips P4 system I have, I have an NEC USB 2.0 card that has a pair of nine pin headers for front USB ports. But as stated, I want to get the Soyo board to work with the Tualatin for other reasons.

Replaced the keyboard/mouse PS2 connector on my Asus TX97-XE.

Ran into a bit of an "issue" during the removal, as seen in the close-up picture... Via pulled out and lifted trace, so I had to repair that. Fun.

After that, it was smooth sailing. Connectivity issue seems fixed. 😀

It may well have been loose via, or trace cracked at bottom of via that was causing your issue, so it's good luck that it went like that.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-05, 04:15:

It may well have been loose via, or trace cracked at bottom of via that was causing your issue, so it's good luck that it went like that.

Yeah, there was no visible solder left in the via, so I assumed it was already weak and perhaps the source of the intermittent connectivity problem I was having. Either way, my fault or a loose via, thankfully it just pulled out and lifted about 1-2mm of trace without breaking it. I was able to attach a small bodge to the trace, feed it back through to the backside of the board to make a good connection.

The joys of PCB repair. 😜

Cosmic wrote on 2024-04-04, 21:27:

PD2JK wrote on 2024-04-02, 20:01:

Finally some working 256k SRAM chips and got this message at the POST, just wonderful to see this line:

The 256K cache looks great with the Overdrive! Love the nice emerald green PCB color too.

Thanks! Will post the final config in the 'Retro Rig Photo Thread' in some near future! 😁

This has got to be the most annoying keyboard I've ever disassembled. I wrestled with this thing for something like two hours in the morning to get it open, without breaking any of the plastic clips. No screws, case is entirely put together with clips. Hardest place was the front of the keyboard, because the plastic was thin as hell, and the tabs were very tight. I thought IBM Model M2 was bad to work with, but this takes the win.

Problem why I started this is, left arrow key doesn't work very well. I noticed that if I push the PCB down right next to it, key works perfectly. I suspect there might be a bad solder joint in the key switch.

edit: Forgot to mention, the machine is IBM PS/2 P70, for those who are not familiar with it.

And it is a bad solder joint for sure. I'm happy the problem was this obvious and easy to fix.

CrFr wrote on 2024-04-05, 08:38:

And it is a bad solder joint for sure. I'm happy the problem was this obvious and easy to fix.

IMGP2359_.jpg

Worth the work in the end, nice machine btw!
Does it have the amber screen?

Yes, it has 😀

This was actually my father's work computer he got brand new in 1989.

CrFr wrote on 2024-04-05, 09:16:

Yes, it has 😀

This was actually my father's work computer he got brand new in 1989.

IMGP2360_.jpg

That’s amazing. It looks like it’s been looked after very well.

Got couple of upgrades for it too. Going to install these next. Getting rid of the SCSI controller + SCSI2SD, and putting in this IDE-CF adapter instead. And sound blaster compatible sound card too, to make it a bit nicer for games.

Very nice, those characters on the screen look quite sharp as well.

CrFr wrote on 2024-04-05, 09:16:

Yes, it has 😀

This was actually my father's work computer he got brand new in 1989.

IMGP2360_.jpg

Super sweet, so a family heirloom by now!

We used to have one when I was a kid, it reminds me how far we have come from these 'luggables' to todays ultrabooks