CMB75 wrote on 2021-01-16, 18:12:

Tried to hook up my 1977 Pong clone console to an older generation LED TV ... didn't work that well. I guess I'll have to search the storage for some older CRT style TVs.

R10-9010.jpgR10-9010-2.jpeg

On the bright side - convinced my daughter to play some ATARI 2600 games with me. We had a lot of fun for a couple of hours. Never underestimate the generation z...

See if you have an old VHS VCR and try connecting the old console to that instead, rather than using the TV's tuner. I have to do this on a couple of LCD TVs, as their onboard Analogue tuners are rather poor, the VCR bypasses this and gives a usable picture.

I was testing out my Reveal SC100 / Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II and the FM worked, but digital audio didn't and I thought it was broken. My two 'testing' setups are both using risers that I designed and PicoPSU supplies - which have no -5v.

Doing some more tests with digital audio, it was there but really quiet, even though FM was regular volume. So I looked at the back of the card and yep, it has a big trace to -5v on there 😀

The tall riser I made, I designed it with the intention to put a negative voltage regulator that goes from 3.3v to -5v and use that for the -5v rail on the riser. I fitted it at last and now the digital audio is working on the SG BX II. Oddly, the audio quality is kind of muffled compared to my anchor electronics MF-002 sound blaster clone card but it does work, and the negative regulator add-on didn't fry anything.

My retro activity for the day was expanding my custom DOSBox frontend to allow configuration of DOSBox mixer levels (mostly so I could set the PC speaker volume to 10% easily, when I want to play DOS games at night without annoying the neighbours or my housemate).

my 486 parts arrived just before the weekend so I spent the weekend setting up and configuring. AMD 486 @ 100mhz, 16mb ram, SB16, M912 VLB Socket 3 mobo (UMC chipset) and a mistake of a video card purchase, a Trident TVGA9000b ISA. Using a Gotek was fun to set up DOS and Win 3.11 although I had major grief using the Floppy software (the Ipcas one), it turns out that it would not, for the life of it, create boot sectors when applying floppy image files to the folders. My solution was to copy the floppy image files to usb, transfer to a win98 pc, burn those images to a CD, copy the CD contents to the same PC that had w98se install existing on the hdd (18 minute boot up of win98 on this 100mhz 16mb beast). From there I used a floppy imaging tool to deploy the floppy images to the separate floppy partitions using the gotek. Things worked first time which was fantastic and even the old AF 6.4gb spinning hdd had zero issues.

The trident has some really odd VGA signal issue, in text mode or if it is just drawing pixels it works fine and doesnt have ghosting, but as soon as the images are coming from an actual graphic or animation I get like a phase/clock ghosting across the entire image, about 40 stripes of odd shading. It's also MUCH slower than what I remembered (had one of these tridents in a 486 many years ago), i feel like i'm getting about 12fps in doom and even a windows 3.11 desktop is laggy to refresh 🤣. I quickly put in an order for a cirrus logic VLB card last night, which should make this 486 into a bit more of a 1995-ish build.

I played a bit of wing commander academy, jurassic park (ocean, 1993), heretic (ran better than doom by about 5fps?), "better" wolfenstein 3d - it adds A and D as individual strafe buttons, beneath a steel sky and monkey island. much nostalgia.

also I learned about early CD-ROM burning and the cd formats quickly after seeing that the dos files I burnt for my pentium system could not be copied across due to using a newer file system. good weekend indeed.

A while ago, my old neighbour gave me a bunch of computers. One of them was this MDG that mice lived in. The damage wasn't too bad but there was a lot of cable chewing. Spiders nested between the RAM slots, etc. The PC obviously spent some time in a garage or maybe even outside. TONS of shredded leaves inside.

I spent a day removing components, cleaning them (washed several cards, the RAM chips (one didn't survive) and generally bleaching the case and resoldering wires.

Unsurprisingly there was rust on the bottom of the case where moisture gathered from shredded leaves and other acidic emissions. That was fun to clean up. Wire brush, steel wool and bleach. Lots of bleach. Then I painted the base with some leftover paint I had from a long sold 1987 Civic (sold in 2018, long sold for me who goes through 3-4 cars a year) - it actually looks pretty good now, and smells neutral 😉 It was recorded and I hope to edit/release the footage to a long overdue Youtube channel 🤣.

Memtesting - most of the components made it - it has Windows 98/XP on the drive now, the last thing I have to do is sort out the drivers.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:08:

wow thats quite a restoration, nice

foil_fresh wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:12:

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:08:

wow thats quite a restoration, nice

Thanks, I'm excited to show the video soon! Problem is that I have to run LAN down to my living room where my editing station/family PC lives, and I have to find time to do that between courses and working FT, and now my wife is taking distance courses so I have to look after kiddo some more. I have yet more respect for mothers and full time Youtubers as a result of this time crunch!

The coolest thing was finding an unhatched spider between two RAM sticks though. Poor thing never made it out of its cocoon 🙁

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:26:

rip spidey

foil_fresh wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:42:

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-18, 01:26:

rip spidey

Haha in the video, I was singing "down came the rain and washed the spider out" while washing the RAM chip.

Wow, this PC is a survivor !

Been checking on the Tracking for my 2 NEC Versa that are coming in - one an M/75, the other a Ultralite Versa 25MHz 486 (the 1st Edition from 1992-1993). The Ultralite comes in circa Friday, but the M/75 is already here - it was out for Delivery Friday and now is "ready for pick-up" that the post-office with no note, so I'm a tad ticked and hoping it goes out for Delivery tomorrow (it's MLK day today). I'm guessing the mail staff shortage due to COVID-19 + the large amount of packages going through is finally getting ot our area. If it's not out for Delivery tomorrow then I'm calling the Post Office since I'm down to 10 days before they send it back to the seller thanks to the holidays and no delivery on Saturday or Sunday (yes, they send mail on Sunday - they call it Amazon sunday since that's the package catch-up day).

Spent last night finally fine-tuning my RetroPie setup. Finally starting to master mapping controls. If you have one, don't buy the Shanwan Duo controllers (2 USB gamepads - one dongle) - had to install a custom Python Script and do a whole mess of mapping custom RetroArch configs on it to get it to work perfectly. Honestly, I don't understand why when it comes to retro gaming why so many people just say "get a Rasberry Pi" - I spend almost as much time tweaking and tuning and editing config files on it as I do gaming on it. Thankfully I enjoy that stuff.

Last night grabbed a ISA card from my "need to work on" pile to try and get working. Is a DFI MIO-400AF, a HD, Floppy, multi-I/O + Mono Video 1990 16bit card.
Have had it a long time but recently was not working proper. Would not properly initialize a HD (BIOS "controller error") and serial port would not see a mouse.
The 8 DIP switch pack must have had some inner corrosion because after spray with cleaner and flipping them switches a bunch everything is working.
Only thing did not test was the Mono vid port. Cannot even find one on Ebay so maybe a bit rare or others had same issue and tossed them ?
Sorry for the poor Q picture of the card, was fairly dark and my iphone does not like low light....

PTherapist wrote on 2021-01-17, 17:29:

CMB75 wrote on 2021-01-16, 18:12:

Tried to hook up my 1977 Pong clone console to an older generation LED TV ... didn't work that well. I guess I'll have to search the storage for some older CRT style TVs.

R10-9010.jpgR10-9010-2.jpeg

On the bright side - convinced my daughter to play some ATARI 2600 games with me. We had a lot of fun for a couple of hours. Never underestimate the generation z...

See if you have an old VHS VCR and try connecting the old console to that instead, rather than using the TV's tuner. I have to do this on a couple of LCD TVs, as their onboard Analogue tuners are rather poor, the VCR bypasses this and gives a usable picture.

True, I grabbed the most beaten up TV combo from storage and it worked "out of the box".

I guess I will do a RGB mod anyway as the R10 9010 is build upon the usual 70s suspect - the AY-3-8500(-1).

Just got my first CF to IDE adapter and I used it to set up a DOS 6.22 install. Remarkable how little noise these retro rigs produce when you get rid of old IDE hard drives.

Also, I put a NOS Speeze copper core cooler into my AthlonXP system. It's much quieter than its stock AMD counterpart which I was using so far.

(Not today but very recently)

I replaced a bad cap on an Asus P4P800 motherboard I found in a dumpster find.

The 1500uf 6.3V cap was just a rotten as it looked. I repaced it with a cheap (low ESR) Panasonic FR series cap. I will use these wherever I think I can get away with using them.

The motherboard seemed happy enough with the new cap when I tested it on my test bench setup.

This Asus P4P800 is a really early Intel Springdale (865PE) board. The boards bios was dated April 22 2003, this is two weeks before the chipset was released so this board is probably from the very first batch.

The board would not run any really decent FSB overclocks, probably not because of decaying caps but because the first batches of Springdale chipsets really were chips that diddn't qualify for the higher end Canterwood bin. Later when Intels yields were better they probably diddn't bin the chips at all and just stamped different names on them without testing/binning depending on what they needed. The only difference between Springdale and Canterwood is some sort of identifier in the chip-package so the Intel BIOS-code would know if ECC and the memory acceleration technology PAT were allowed or not, this code was later hacked to allow PAT even on Springdale.

The board could do just over 260 MHz FSB using the 3:2 memory ratio, 258 MHz FSB using the 5:4 memory ratio and 248 MHz FSB using the 1:1 memory ratio with some 512MB Samsung TCCD sticks and the P4 2600C CPU I found with the board. I updated the BIOS to the latest beta but the result was the same. I'm confident it's the chipset that reached a brick wall as the CPU would not scale with increased voltage at all.

I also tested a P4 2800C from another dumpster find and the P4P800 had no issues with running this CPU at 3500MHz using stock voltage.

My old iPod Nano 1st gen (2GB) battery just ran out of power a few months ago, now I just recharged it and found that my songs were gone.

No problem, I fired up my Windows XP virtual machine, loaded iTunes 7.x, turns out it was a mac-formatted iPod (wtf) so I restored it as a windows formatted iPod, and re-synced them back along with a few new songs. That's 289 songs so far, adding up to 1GB of songs. I used 128kb bitrate instead of 256 or higher to make room for enough or more songs on it. (also to get the job done quicker).

Right now enjoying "Survivor - The Moment of Truth" from Karate Kid movie soundtrack on it and my headphones. Fun.

Next on my list is to get Tetris Classic running on any of my VMs so my parents can enjoy it as they did years ago. I'll do that at the end of the day after my work is done.

Oh man... someone gave me an estate-sale Pionex desktop PC a few years ago, with all the paperwork, books for all the components, etc.

I had put it on the back burner all this time, but decided to power it on today to test it out.

WOW... this thing takes me back. Not because I had a Pionex system, and not because it is anything like the computers I used at the time. No no...

Because it is loaded with iconic early 2000s spyware and junk software! It reminds me of the first computers I was paid to fix!

Look at msconfig (I have already unchecked a lot).

BonziBuddy, ClickTheButton, New.Net... save.exe? Patch.exe? In the Windows directory? Oh dear.

Strangely, the entire Program Files directory is missing, so things aren't working so well. At this point I'm not sure if it's due to a virus\malware infection or if the Quantum Bigfoot has been nuking directories to keep itself busy. It looks like it was last used in 2003-2004 or so.

I'll definitely be wiping the drive and testing it to see if it's useful or not.

These systems were sold on QVC (cable TV channel advertising things you could order over the phone), and surprisingly it has an MSI 440BX board with 3 ISA slots (with manual), a decent looking SPI power supply, P2 350, i740 AGP (Apollo brand, with the manual), all in a very compact (for the time) full-atx case with a side mounted PSU to make it shorter.

Broke two pins. On a Powerleap PL-Pro/MMX Plus Ver4.0 :'(

Bodged an attempted repair too, looks like it's a write-off :'( :'(

That has to hurt.

Haven't done anything retro in a while, except I changed the oil on my car and used penetrating fluid on the power steering bearing as it squeaks and chirps because it's misaligned when I reinstalled the pulley on the new pump. Does working on a 20 year old car count as retro activity?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-01-19, 15:32:

Just got my first CF to IDE adapter and I used it to set up a DOS 6.22 install. Remarkable how little noise these retro rigs produce when you get rid of old IDE hard drives.

Also, I put a NOS Speeze copper core cooler into my AthlonXP system. It's much quieter than its stock AMD counterpart which I was using so far.

Yes, and a CF/IDE adapter combined with a quiet ATX power supply, it's an enjoyable experience. I'm using it for my 286, 386 and 486 setups. It's amazing, the noise we used to put up with. I'm not sure how we did it...