BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-29, 06:07:

I've been having a bit of a retro writeoff month, lots of chores, appointments, running around, leaving me zapped, then the migh […]
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I've been having a bit of a retro writeoff month, lots of chores, appointments, running around, leaving me zapped, then the mighty engines of tree semen fired up to max and pollened up the air, which has had me even more zapped. Looked for new coping tips, found something that went like "What you don't want to do if you've got bad pollen sensitivity, is live in southern Ontario, which is about the worst area in all Canada" well then, screw me right? Stuck a new HEPA filter in the HVAC, just about takes the edge off a bit. Zombie mode engaged a lot though, drooped in front of the TV sniffing and snorting.

House/yard maintenance probs are looming though and look like occupying a good chunk of coming months, and insane chunks of cash quite likely. But a lot of them I can't do crap about if it's either too polleny, or too rainy. So maybe will get some playtime on rainy days, IDK about the remaining dry but polleny ones, much zombie, too brain fog. Anyway, if I'm missing for long periods I'm dealing with crap or zoned out.

In between the foggy bits, sorta been planning a "lunchbox portable" style build. Though just got disappointed because it turned out my "small monitor" was bigger than I thought, thought I had a 14" or even 13" LCD, but it was a 15". So unless something turns up, might need to get into some homebrew LCD interfacing. Unsure whether ATI's AMC connector is going to be helpful or not. It's going to be socket 7, but not sure whether I'm going Cyrix for the better crawler gears or AMD for the top end. It's getting ATI rage pro turbo or 128 graphics because I seem to have some unassigned and everything more premium is kinda earmarked for serious desktop configurations not quirky experimental contraptions.

Also into some preliminary pondering for a proper retro subnet, since I've gotta rejig the modern end.

When I was younger as in child through teens, I had quite some allergy going on every time summer comes around due to plant pollen, I preferred medicine that does not make me drowsy. If that was, I would be floating though rooms and having hard time sleeping. Odd but true.

Now I'm much better now.

Why not look through the allergy medicines available that are not drowsy for you?

Cheers,

Retro Fun: Investigating whether TX chipsets offer enough USB utility in DOS to be worth stronger consideration than VX/HX/Other.

I have been playing around with recent purchase MSI MS-6368 v2.1. Bought it as "working/turned on".
However after getting it and powering on with iGPU(Trident 3D blade something) picture was very "wavy".
Power delivery 3300uf Caps very slightly inflated. As it turns out after desoldering and measuring with LCR meter they registered in AUTO mode as resistors (ouch) with 2+ Ohm ESR. I'm amazed it booted up with 55oMhz Celeron at all.
Replaced with previously salvaged caps. Did not had two big ones (2200uf 10v) at hand. Managed to get rid waves in normal txt mode but with they are still slightly visible in higher resolution. Also not sure what kind of mode Implulse Tracker is using, but I can see test shimmering in some text fields. Needs more investigation. No issues with discrete PCI VGA card.
btw board has nice via on board DOS native SBPro sound. Also with SBEMU tested it as SB16 - works.

Anyway my main goal was to test Orpheus II spdif analogue source digital noise I'm getting when enabling Interwave - sadly "no sigar" - both my main P3 440BX rig and this one are producing same noise 🙁 It must be something in the air...

I might be barking up wrong tree for chipset comparison of USB legacy device support, seems more to do with BIOS support, though good USB hardware a part of it. Interestingly in a Pheonix BIOS pdf about USB legacy I saw that hotplug for USB legacy devices is optional and not guaranteed. Meaning if your USB Keyboard/Mouse doesn't work in DOS, make sure you tried with it plugged in from cold boot. Current interest is for portable experiment and having more USB keyboards in a friendly shape for it than PS/2 .

vutt wrote on 2023-04-30, 13:42:

both my main P3 440BX rig and this one are producing same noise 🙁 It must be something in the air...

If you are meaning external interference coming in through radio waves, then it might be local, or it might be more widespread. If you look for some Estonian Radio Amateur forums, you might find some discussion there if there is a wider problem. (Thinking it might also be possible that if Russia is on full military readiness, they might have RADAR, jamming and electronic countermeasures turned up to maximum power, which might make for a very poor radio environment in neighboring countries.)

@BitWrangler
Well I was half-joking about air.
However my next step is about power lines. One option could be isolating transformer. Another one is one of those beefy power banks with mains power out. Could be very useful item in household anyway.
With power bank I could drive to woods and test there so I will eliminate location (air) factor completely. 😀

That's an Epic sound card on a rather budget board, but good job getting it back to working 😀
(also, ah that's where the IW78C21M1s went)

Today I pulled out the Toshiba Satellite 2800-500 again since I decided to fit a cheap 1.5w speaker from ebay to replace its damaged right speaker. In conclusion it now sounds way better and the right speaker sounds better than the original left speaker. However, the left speaker still goes much louder, so I do need to buy the 2w speakers really.
To anyone that has a Satellite 2800 laptop, make sure to press that Bass button, it makes such a difference!

I've been put off doing anything with the Satellite 2800 because it's now dual booting Windows ME (factory restore image) and Windows 2000, but what I really want is a tri-boot setup, with Windows 98SE, Windows ME and Windows 2000.
C:\ (primary partition) - Windows ME originally, I want to put Windows 98SE here without breaking the factory install of ME
D:\ (extended partition 1) - 4GB and FAT32 which is where I want Windows ME to go
E:\ (extended partition 2) - big NTFS partition for Windows 2000
To that end I've copied the WinME install onto the D drive and got it to boot by editing MSDOS.SYS to have a WinDir and WinBootDir of "D:\Windows" - that actually worked! But only partially since a bunch of applications like Windows Help stuff would crash with DLL errors.
Then exported the registry and changed every C:\\ reference to D:\\ with notepad++. There are 5000+ entries to change and I was trying to do it manually 🤣
Now Windows ME is running from the D drive like it was installed there to start with. Next I think I have to use Bootpart to capture the Windows Me boot stuff and then I can install Windows 98 onto it. Hopefully this works.

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once by reflowing chips pins. Card was initially in very rough shape with visibly twisted chips.
However it "developed" year later texture corruption type of artifacts. With Donut tech demo I was able to get rid artifacts by disabling one of the texture chips. I suspected again disconnected pins, but I could not find unfortunately culprit few months ago by using my gentle toothpick pushing method under microscope.

Today I went for power on live test on open bench. While card was running I skidded toothpick gently over main chip pins and managed to identify moment when corruption on screen slightly changed. Then power off, applied a lot of flux on faulty pins, slide iron over pins to reflow and ...
... manged to bend few healthy pins (ouch). Oh well, my self inflicted wound took 1h repair with very visually sketchy outcome. Result is electrically sound, but I'll spare you seeing how it now looks. With this Gainward card overhanging heatsinks on chips it's very hard to operate... ...excuses, excuses 😀

Long story short - it worked! Another old hardware restored. As part of celebration went to browse V2 e-bay offerings in order to get a feeling like I have just gained 100 EUR+ ...

vutt wrote on 2023-05-01, 09:40:

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once […]
Show full quote

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once by reflowing chips pins. Card was initially in very rough shape with visibly twisted chips.
However it "developed" year later texture corruption type of artifacts. With Donut tech demo I was able to get rid artifacts by disabling one of the texture chips. I suspected again disconnected pins, but I could not find unfortunately culprit few months ago by using my gentle toothpick pushing method under microscope.

Today I went for power on live test on open bench. While card was running I skidded toothpick gently over main chip pins and managed to identify moment when corruption on screen slightly changed. Then power off, applied a lot of flux on faulty pins, slide iron over pins to reflow and ...
... manged to bend few healthy pins (ouch). Oh well, my self inflicted wound took 1h repair with very visually sketchy outcome. Result is electrically sound, but I'll spare you seeing how it now looks. With this Gainward card overhanging heatsinks on chips it's very hard to operate... ...excuses, excuses 😀

Long story short - it worked! Another old hardware restored. As part of celebration went to browse V2 e-bay offerings in order to get a feeling like I have just gained 100 EUR+ ...

Always great to see another Voodoo card restored!

Today I finished moving my 486 into a "better" case and had a nightmare doing it:

https://youtu.be/BKeEtnydQ4U

vutt wrote on 2023-05-01, 09:40:

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once […]
Show full quote

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once by reflowing chips pins. Card was initially in very rough shape with visibly twisted chips.
However it "developed" year later texture corruption type of artifacts. With Donut tech demo I was able to get rid artifacts by disabling one of the texture chips. I suspected again disconnected pins, but I could not find unfortunately culprit few months ago by using my gentle toothpick pushing method under microscope.

Today I went for power on live test on open bench. While card was running I skidded toothpick gently over main chip pins and managed to identify moment when corruption on screen slightly changed. Then power off, applied a lot of flux on faulty pins, slide iron over pins to reflow and ...
... manged to bend few healthy pins (ouch). Oh well, my self inflicted wound took 1h repair with very visually sketchy outcome. Result is electrically sound, but I'll spare you seeing how it now looks. With this Gainward card overhanging heatsinks on chips it's very hard to operate... ...excuses, excuses 😀

Long story short - it worked! Another old hardware restored. As part of celebration went to browse V2 e-bay offerings in order to get a feeling like I have just gained 100 EUR+ ...

I've repaired at least two Voodoo 2s with pins that have cracked at the joint or disconnected. It may be a result of thermal cycling. If I have a defective card, I carefully reflow the pins on all of the large chip packages, which is extremely time consuming, but at least I know that all the pins are in good working order when I'm finished.

It's much easier to see under a microscope. I use the fine point of a multimeter probe to push on individual legs. It's not uncommon to see them appear to connected, but slide with a bit of pressure; only held in place by leftover flux. I suspect that these joints are actually cracked, but they are still close enough to make a connection; until it doesn't.

I've been going through multiple boxes of old disks I have accumulated from people over the past several years. It can be tedious, but it can also be really interesting to find weird old software.

All of the stuff I've been going through yesterday and today has been on 5.25" floppies, and all of it is from 1984 to 1987 so far. There are some sets of disks that seem to have not aged well and they make terrible noises as soon as I start to lock the lever on the drive. I would say that less than 20% of the disks that are noisy work at all. And maybe 5-10% are completely readable (usually requires removing the disk, running a cleaner through the drive, blowing into the disk to move debris around, etc.... but it does work). The disks that don't make lots of noise have so far been about 85% readable I would estimate. I've been quite surprised. There have been a fair amount that were so noisy though that I didn't even bother fully latching the drive and just pulled them out.

I have one mystery for the old timers here though:
I've found tons of disks containing assorted software, probably downloaded from a BBS or something. I have already gone through probably 90% of this stuff over the years, but I'm down to the last 10% and I have stumbled upon some strange disks. There are multiple sets marked "Arc 1" , "Arc 2" etc. , which I presume are simply general "archives" of downloaded software and files, since the files aren't exclusively in .arc format. The puzzling thing is that one set of 20 disks is marked separately "Arc 1 - 720K Disk", "Arc 2 - 720K Disk", etc. and all are marked as 720K. Yet, when I read them everything single last one of that set of 20 works perfectly fine and is formatted as a standard 360K disk. I have read every file off of all 20 disks in this set with no errors, and not a single one was 720K.

Just in case any turned out to be 720K, I read that it's possible to sort of trick a PC into allowing 720K 5.25" formats by changing the BIOS setting for the drive to 3.5" 720K. I did this, and surprisingly, this doesn't seem to hurt anything and allows me to read the disks totally normally... but they are still only 360K with ~350K of data on them. I also found discussion of a TSR that allows a PC to easily format 720K 5.25" disks, so it's possible that someone could have done this years ago, but I see no sign of that being done on these. I ran the TSR in DOS mode on my PC and it made no difference in how these disks are being read whether I have the drive set to 720K or 1.2MB in the BIOS. I would assume that if my drive was just not reading the disk format properly they would not work, or I would get errors. It seems odd that it would somehow only see 360K of data and be able to pull it off of every disk without errors.

Anyone have any idea why these disks would be marked this way aside from simply being a mistake? Seems like a very strange mistake. I guess it's also possible that they were reformatted as 360K later, or possibly batch formatted to 360K by some archiving software (insert next disk... format... compress file... copy to disk... insert next disk... format...), but it seems odd to me that someone would have left this set of 20 separated, carefully stored in a ziplock bag and left mislabeled as to capacity.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-02, 05:27:

I've been going through multiple boxes of old disks I have accumulated from people over the past several years. It can be tedious, but it can also be really interesting to find weird old software.

it's tedious yet interesting! it's really like peering into the past, even more so than and old PC somehow, i think its the fact that floppy disks are separate from the PC

it amazes me how many in a random set of disks will still work

not sure on the 720k mystery, it may be an honest mistake from the past

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-05-01, 23:11:

vutt wrote on 2023-05-01, 09:40:

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once […]
Show full quote

Since I had motherboard on open bench (few posts above) I decided to investigate my faulty Voodoo 2. I actually repaired it once by reflowing chips pins. Card was initially in very rough shape with visibly twisted chips.
However it "developed" year later texture corruption type of artifacts. With Donut tech demo I was able to get rid artifacts by disabling one of the texture chips. I suspected again disconnected pins, but I could not find unfortunately culprit few months ago by using my gentle toothpick pushing method under microscope.

Today I went for power on live test on open bench. While card was running I skidded toothpick gently over main chip pins and managed to identify moment when corruption on screen slightly changed. Then power off, applied a lot of flux on faulty pins, slide iron over pins to reflow and ...
... manged to bend few healthy pins (ouch). Oh well, my self inflicted wound took 1h repair with very visually sketchy outcome. Result is electrically sound, but I'll spare you seeing how it now looks. With this Gainward card overhanging heatsinks on chips it's very hard to operate... ...excuses, excuses 😀

Long story short - it worked! Another old hardware restored. As part of celebration went to browse V2 e-bay offerings in order to get a feeling like I have just gained 100 EUR+ ...

I've repaired at least two Voodoo 2s with pins that have cracked at the joint or disconnected. It may be a result of thermal cycling. If I have a defective card, I carefully reflow the pins on all of the large chip packages, which is extremely time consuming, but at least I know that all the pins are in good working order when I'm finished.

It's much easier to see under a microscope. I use the fine point of a multimeter probe to push on individual legs. It's not uncommon to see them appear to connected, but slide with a bit of pressure; only held in place by leftover flux. I suspect that these joints are actually cracked, but they are still close enough to make a connection; until it doesn't.

I have a practical question about this, to reflow you use quite a lot of flux which then goes under the ICs. Do you "wash" the cards to get rid of it as it can be conductive or do you simply live with it?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-02, 05:27:

Anyone have any idea why these disks would be marked this way aside from simply being a mistake? Seems like a very strange mistake. I guess it's also possible that they were reformatted as 360K later, or possibly batch formatted to 360K by some archiving software (insert next disk... format... compress file... copy to disk... insert next disk... format...), but it seems odd to me that someone would have left this set of 20 separated, carefully stored in a ziplock bag and left mislabeled as to capacity.

It's possible that the user misunderstood unformatted and formatted capacity and thought that you divide it by two? It seems like an odd mistake.

Well my faithful old XP box just started giving me trouble, taking forever to start up, it would hang at black screen after the "starting xp" for minutes then finally load up with no flags/issues etc.
Found one of the secondary hard drives (used just for file storage) is failing and not showing a drive letter in explorer. With drive disconnected boots up just like it should.

It sounds like the drive is having trouble spinning up to speed. Does it work intermittently or not at all?

Following on from my attempt to use Bootpart to get Win2k, WinMe and Win98 onto this Satellite 2800 laptop, I don't think bootpart can do that. It can do dos+winme+win2k, but not Win98+WinMe. The process ended up being somewhat convoluted:
Backed up factory preinstall of Windows Me
Installed Windows 2000 on an extended NTFS partition
Nuked Windows Me and put Windows 98 there instead, which gives me meaningful ability to use DOS again
Installed SysCom2000 and got that working with both operating systems
Used the System Commander OS wizard to install Windows Me into a 4GB partition I'd left space for between the primary + extended partitions
Installed a fresh Windows Me onto that 4GB partition - which was way harder than it should've been because WinMe purposely breaks "format /s" and "sys c:" commands so only a proper CD install can work
Put the factory preload Windows Me over that fresh copy so that it's back to how it was with all the drivers and things

At last, now I can triple boot the Sat 2800 and get proper working sound drivers and DOS support.

Also, the other day I recapped a Toshiba 400CDT power supply - NJD-4286 / UA0400P01. Thankfully the main capacitor discharged itself after sitting for a few hours, but before it was recapped it was just making a ticking sound and gave out that fishy smell. The 50v 39uF cap and the 35v 56uF capacitors had leaked their cap juice which makes sense since they're enclosed in a plastic box for isolation from other components, so they get much hotter and fail faster. They're both 6.5mm diameter and 12mm tall, rated for 105c.
In fact it was only the 50v cap that tested bad with high ESR. Found some caps on a scrapped ATX power supply that fit closely enough, though the 35v got uprated to 100uF I think the 50v cap was pretty close at something like 47uF.
Cleaning up the cap juice was the main problem, it was shorting out a couple of resistors that it had got underneath - that ticking sound was probably the short protection.
Kinda surprising but all the rest of the caps on the board that I tested, match their original capacitance with negligible ESR. I didn't test the big 400v cap, which looks to be in fine condition.
Now this is written down, I can throw those caps away 😀

Why would you want both Windows 98 and ME on the same computer?

Just because I want the factory preinstall available to check out, since I had the recovery CDs with it. The more I use Windows Me the less I like it, but it's nice to check out now and then.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-05-02, 15:02:

It sounds like the drive is having trouble spinning up to speed. Does it work intermittently or not at all?

Good question ! Have not had time to check it more thorough as there are 4 HDs and 3 case fans so with side cover off cannot really tell.
One thing: BIOS see's all 4 HD but one is not shown under Device manager and it's drive letters are missing. Pulled cable off it and xp starts like expected.
That is as far as I got. Will pull it out and see if it spins up on the quieter bench machine.

Update: moved HD to another computer and it gets detected by BIOS but also causes Windows 7 to hang. It does spin up and sounds normal. Using a Linux based boot CD was able to grab a few non-replaceable files off it (that took near an hour for a few 100Mbs).
So a drive can die but still be detected by BIOS and appear to be functional but not... it is some odd thing I never seen before. Luckily had just a bunch of replaceable files on it.
Guess I should have mirrored it to a newer drive a few years ago or made a back up image. Just noticed it been in near daily use since before 2009....so a lot of time on the drive.
Last check with Crystal DIsk it was still Green, no issues....

Uhg... I've got this "problem"...

I have a hard time figuring out how many old floppy disks to keep.

I have finally managed to figure out what I have, copy the contents of anything that has any chance of not being available online, putting the good disks in a box to get rid of and chucking the obviously bad disks... but I still have a ton of them! (And don't worry, any that are good that I don't intend to keep will be going in a lot of used disks to sell... not in the garbage. I just need to clear out the space).

I am planning to keep all of the 720K 3.5" floppies because I don't have that many and I find that they are super robust and are far less likely to be defective (probably due in part to the less dense data, but they are just plain heavier and rarely make bad sounds while spinning).

I deleted the contents on probably 25 360K 5.25" disks to keep them as blanks, but then when I realized that like 60 more 5.25" disks were almost all filled with partial .arc files of very common programs (dbase, autocad, orcad, etc.) that didn't need to be preserved AND they were basically all readable except for maybe 3... I'm having a very hard time getting myself to just dump these in a lot of disks on ebay when they are apparently built well enough to last 40 years in storage (all written in the mid 80s), and at some point I just won't be finding more of these.

I have probably 15 or so brand new 5.25" floppies. What has me wanting to keep all the used ones though is that up till now 98% of my "retro computing" has been with systems that have hard drives and at least the option of 3.5" drives (or other storage), so there's a good chance I'll be using far more of these as I start tinkering with older PCs. I own a couple of Apple IIe systems that I intend to dabble with more in the future... if an Apple IIe can use the same disks as a PC (after formatting of course), then I definitely feel like I should keep the extra disks so I can copy games to them. The same goes for any other types of machines I may get in the future. I know there are differences between single sided and double sided, but can older PCs with 5.25" drives basically all use the same disks that a PC would format as 360K? I believe every one of the disks I have tested recently is DS DD or at least formatted to 360K.

As far as 1.44MB 3.5" floppies go, I have... *counting*... oh wow... 175 Imation disks brand new in package, 50 Fujifilm brand new in package and a largish (maybe 200 count?) box of really generic looking ones that are also brand new. I will never ever use this many... but part of me is also concerned that at some point the materials these newer disks are made of will simply deteriorate and they'll all be dead, whether they're used or not. I know that the quality of floppies dropped over time, and these are all definitely newer ones... but when I look at the space taken up by yet more old used floppies with writing all over them, it seems kind of ridiculous to hang onto them while also hording almost 500 brand new ones. 🤯

And just to be clear... I don't buy these things. Almost every one of these disks I'm talking about now have been given to me in the past 7-8 years since I started collecting this stuff. Both the new ones and the old ones.

What I'll probably do:

Keep a small pile of the best looking brand name 3.5" used disks just so I don't feel incredibly stupid later if all the new ones end up being junk.

Keep as many of the 5.25" disks as I can reasonably store in one container without taking up more space (looks like about 90 used ones in sleeves, and 15 new ones)... as well as a bunch of extra sleeves, because... I have no idea. 🙁

... ugh, and all this will leave me with a few really nice but totally empty disk containers if I sell a whole bunch of disks online. 🤯 (Obvious solution is to then get rid of the containers... but they aren't exactly worth much, and why would any self respecting retro PC enthusiast want to get rid of floppy disk containers that could be filled with game disks later?? Amirite??)