dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-11, 13:57:

So I want to buy a K6-2 500MHz CPU, but the seller have two different chips. One is 0016APEW and other one is 0045MPM, is there any difference between the two?

The attachment 27236821_1733697205_046.jpg is no longer available

The only thing that actually changes something is the AFX/AFR/whatever else, in your case both are the same. This is documented in the K6-2 data sheet.

Edit: John at https://cpushack.com/K6xID.html has an identification guide. Tl:dr: take the lowest base voltage with highest supported temperature if you have a choice, ACZ for example. But if you run them at stock speeds, honestly it doesn't matter at all.

Ok, got it. Thanks guys 🙂.

Masterchief79 wrote on 2024-12-11, 14:08:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-11, 12:58:

I only have a cheap hot air station, which is more then enough for most use cases. However, it never gets hot enough to remove BGA memory chips from these huge copper ground plane video cards. Especially when it's ROHS solder. I've given up on trying to repair the faulty memory on my 5900s until I can get a better one.

Also preheat. It's invaluable to this stuff. I solder all my BGA work at 120-150°C PCB temperature so I can use very low temperatures on my hot air station. Especially important when soldering GPUs, they don't like heat.

When you say pre-heat, do you mean by heating around the board with the hot air station or using heat from the other side, with a proper pre-heater? (or are there good makeshift methods?)

Great job on the FX5700 repair. I initially hadn't noticed who had bought it and then you started talking about the damaged VRM section and reflowing stuff 😀 It couldn't be in better hands

The last couple of days I've been going through some parts I bought from the UK based recycler, a CL-GD5426 VLB card with pins smashed on one side of the chip and a PC Chips M912 V6.1 that's missing a bit:

Because I wanted to fix something but didn't want to deal with the serious battery corrosion on most of the other boards he has available for spares/repairs. My reasoning was that the broken off area doesn't really have anything going through it so it should be easy repair? I should've looked a little closer perhaps because the back is where the bad stuff happened:

It was smashed hard on the back permanently deforming the PCB around two ISA slots, with many deep scratches going through groups of traces around the CPU and ISA slots. In total I've repaired around 30 severed traces, but it does work to the point where it can fully POST and all the VLB slots work. Well the 72-pin SIMM slots don't work yet but I think I can see which trace is broken there now too. Patching severed traces isn't too bad, I have a box of cut legs from resistors/capacitors and they solder nicely on top of severed traces with a little flux. 30AWG insulated wrapping wire works well for the very fine pitch stuff with neighbouring traces.

Down by the CPU there was a smashed 10-pin 10k ohm resistor pack where only two of the nine resistors still were there and it had cracked in two. I only have a 9-pin resistor pack with 10k resistance so the working part of the broken resistor pack is left in place and I've bodged the 9-pin resistor pack on top of it to connect the rest 😀

The Cirrus Logic card was a bit of a silly purchase where I should've looked harder at the datasheet first. All of the pins on one corner were smashed in and the data pins D0 to D3 broke off, the traces they connected too had smashed off in the process and they run under the chip. With three of them I was able to solder onto what was left of those traces but D1 had to be done as a new trace. And the BIOS was broken too, but now the card works. Kinda proud that I was able to fix this and the mainboard without pulling out the microscope

Lastly, the fake cache chips were removed. These SOJ fake cache chips don't melt like the DIP ones do but their traces also go nowhere and connect to nothing:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-11, 18:12:

The last couple of days I've been going through some parts I bought from the UK based recycler, a CL-GD5426 VLB card with pins smashed on one side of the chip and a PC Chips M912 V6.1 that's missing a bit:

That's not a missing bit ... more like a byte 🤣

Another interesting mobo to add to my collection. Commate S7AX, with a dire need of recap 😀

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-11, 18:12:

Kinda proud that I was able to fix this and the mainboard without pulling out the microscope

I salute your commitment and heroic deed 🫡

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-11, 18:12:

The last couple of days I've been going through some parts I bought from the UK based recycler, a CL-GD5426 VLB card with pins s […]
Show full quote

The last couple of days I've been going through some parts I bought from the UK based recycler, a CL-GD5426 VLB card with pins smashed on one side of the chip and a PC Chips M912 V6.1 that's missing a bit:

The attachment m912-with-a-bit-missing.JPG is no longer available

Because I wanted to fix something but didn't want to deal with the serious battery corrosion on most of the other boards he has available for spares/repairs. My reasoning was that the broken off area doesn't really have anything going through it so it should be easy repair? I should've looked a little closer perhaps because the back is where the bad stuff happened:

The attachment m912-back.jpg is no longer available

By the love of God, but why such savagery?? Anyhow, great job on reviving them ! That gave me the idea o making a "Lazarus" project of my own.

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived:

Complete in box. It wasn't crazy expensive, but not trivial either. The tipping factor was all the paperwork and box. Cursed luck I guess.....

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:43:

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived

Is that the one that sold recently on eBay? I was watching that also but let it go.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-11, 18:12:

I love these success stories.
Patience is the key.

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:43:

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived: […]
Show full quote

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived:

The attachment SCC1_01.jpg is no longer available

The attachment SCC1_02.jpg is no longer available

Complete in box. It wasn't crazy expensive, but not trivial either. The tipping factor was all the paperwork and box. Cursed luck I guess.....

Nice! There's just something special about the packaging for old MIDI gear.

I'm happy to say that I managed to get an SCC-1 myself (just the bare card...) several months ago in a lot with a whole bunch of other parts. I have a bunch of Roland sound modules but I was starting to think I'd never come across one of the internal MIDI devices. It works perfectly too! Additionally, after getting it I learned that the SCC-1 can also be used for a 100% MPU-401 "Inteligent Mode" compatible midi interface for running an MT-32 as intended... bonus! 😀

I'm still waiting to find a Roland RAP-10 though... even though it offers no benefits over what I already have, it for some reason has this "unicorn" status in my mind from the days of running sound setup programs for DOS games under Windows 9x. Whatever soft synths I was using always tended to work properly and sound great when selecting the "Roland RAP-10" option, and my uneducated mind apparently decided to make that a core memory... so, it has always seemed like the RAP-10 was some kind of special thing. To be fair, the name just has this perfect 90s vibe and they do look cool... like an SB16 covered in Roland chips. 😁

Is that floppy included with the SCC-1 archived somewhere? What's on it?

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-13, 00:41:

Is that floppy included with the SCC-1 archived somewhere? What's on it?

Looks like someone may have uploaded the contents a while back but the link is broken.

Requesting floppy image of SCC-1 utility/driver disk

Presumably, keropi has it now, since he requested it. Though that was 12 years ago. 😮

EDIT: Oh, it might be this one. http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=9 … menustate=67,52

Though that is apparently for the SCC-1A, which is the slightly later version (SC55 MkII equivalent).

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-13, 00:49:

Looks like someone may have uploaded the contents a while back but the link is broken. […]
Show full quote

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-13, 00:41:

Is that floppy included with the SCC-1 archived somewhere? What's on it?

Looks like someone may have uploaded the contents a while back but the link is broken.

Requesting floppy image of SCC-1 utility/driver disk

Presumably, keropi has it now, since he requested it. Though that was 12 years ago. 😮

EDIT: Oh, it might be this one. http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=9 … menustate=67,52

Though that is apparently for the SCC-1A, which is the slightly later version (SC55 MkII equivalent).

The first link is available on archive.org - https://web.archive.org/web/20140910200523/ht … /1331850451.zip

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:43:

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived: […]
Show full quote

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived:

The attachment SCC1_01.jpg is no longer available

The attachment SCC1_02.jpg is no longer available

Complete in box. It wasn't crazy expensive, but not trivial either. The tipping factor was all the paperwork and box. Cursed luck I guess.....

Wow, probably quite a lot of prices would be reasonable for a card in that condition. So rare to see one boxed, pretty good luck I say 😀

Nexxen wrote on 2024-12-12, 19:41:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-11, 18:12:

I love these success stories.
Patience is the key.

This lot of junk items I bought has been great overall, nothing worked to start with but patience and persistence are key 😀 . The Cirrus Logic VLB card and the M912 were the repairs I thought would be easier but they were rather more involved than expected, see what the VLB card looked like close up before I started on it. Should've looked at the datasheet first to know that those damaged traces were the main data lines and they only ran under the chip and the traces were broken too:

The real important part of the lot for me which has been making me sad for the last couple of days is this nice Taken PCI400 board / Zida 4DPS (clone? relative? pirate copy?). I've been after a late 486 PCI/ISA board with SiS 496/497 chipset since I broke my last one: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today? and still haven't got my Asus PVI-486SP3 working to a satisfactory level, that one still has broken dma/floppy/super-io.

The seller said it would give POST codes but failed on a pretty meaningless one and didn't display anything, once I got I realised that the socket is too far gone and I have a spare I salvaged from a board years ago, time to use it:

I did a near perfect job on the socket swap, only two stuck pins when I lifted the socket and 0% damaged vias or traces. The board is otherwise just about immaculate, whatever hit it hit the CPU socket first. It also took out a 4.7k bussed resistor array but I had one in my parts bin, probably from the same board I got the socket from. The donor board I broke a few years back when I wasn't very good at soldering.
But the CPU replacement and replaced component didn't work, the board with its Award PnP BIOS would only go to post code 0c (set up CMOS data area) but would go further with a couple of CPUs, oddly the 486 SX and the Cyrix 5x86. It would actually run the display going as far as the BIOS screen but wouldn't show the CPU or count up the RAM. It was sticking on code 1B or perhaps 18 but neither of those means anything so I was a bit stuck.
Put it away for a couple of days and that's when I worked on the VLB card and M912 instead.

Today I looked at it from a different angle and you can even vaguely see the fault in the picture, the corner of the SiS 85C497 southbridge at pin 80 onwards are lifted up a bit. Soldered those down and now the board fully POSTs and has run 8 cycles of memtest now 😀
So all the broken items I bought, they were all fixable, given time.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-13, 01:34:

A deserved applause!

VLB is boring as hell is hot, but socket is a very risky situation: bravo!
Keep us posted, this is interesting. IDK if socket 3 are that easy to find if needed to be purchased.

Probably because I like repairs, but I like this kind of posts.

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-11, 13:57:

So I want to buy a K6-2 500MHz CPU, but the seller have two different chips. One is 0016APEW and other one is 0045MPM, is there any difference between the two?

Both made in 2000, it’s exactly the same model and stepping so maybe look at underside photo whether the pins are not bent and take the better of the two.

Another CRT to add to me collection- HP Ultra VGA 1280.

Xicor wrote on 2024-12-12, 15:43:

Finlay found a Roland SCC1 at a "reasonable" price, and it just arrived:
Complete in box. It wasn't crazy expensive, but not trivial either.

So only one kidney instead both?

I picked this up on Wednesday because it's the same case as the PC my family bought in 1997 from Tiny here in the UK. They seem to be quite hard to find now? It doesn't help that searching for 'tiny pc' gets you completely useless results! Ours was AT and S7 P200, this one is ATX and contains MSI MS-6119 board, PIII 450, 384MB ram, 6GB and 12GB HDDs, Geforce 4 MX 420, a Yamaha sound card, a modem, and a wifi card. The optical drive doesn't read discs. I'm assuming the ram has been upgraded from a 128MB base, the 12GB HDD added (the one floating around...), graphics card changed, and wifi card added. The chassis and 6GB drive are dated March 1999.

Amazingly though I just cleaned it out and it fired right up and booted into a WinXP install.

I'll retrobrite the front panel in the spring when the sun reappears and then set about building a replica of our old Socket 7 PC in it 😀