I finally got arround to playing with a few parts I got over the last month or so:

My ISA YMF-719 based sound card and my "new" DB50XG

My PCI NEC-based USB card... which I got basically for free! (A local store had this HP 3.25" bay card reader that comes with the card for real cheap... I wanted the card reader, so here we are)

Now I can barely wait for my Voodoo² to arrive!

BTW does anyone knows if these are worth i?

Nice purchase on the DB50XG. Regarding the 5.25" bay speakers, the sound is poor to say the least. I guess it's ok if you're going to be taking your pc around to mates houses every now and then or if you have minimal desk space. Seller has also listed it as new but in the item description he states that it is used.

borgie83 wrote:

Nice purchase on the DB50XG. Regarding the 5.25" bay speakers, the sound is poor to say the least. I guess it's ok if you're going to be taking your pc around to mates houses every now and then or if you have minimal desk space. Seller has also listed it as new but in the item description he states that it is used.

Yeah! I have been on the lookout for a MIDI daughterboard for some time, and when I saw that one I finally took the bullet (to my wallet). I was able to test it with the case open on the top slot (LPX case, so there was one slot with the top unobstructed... if you tilt the card a bit, that is) but now I need to make a flat cable and find a way to attach it somewhere inside the case.

I noticed that too. Still trying to decide what to do...

Oh, and for future reference... If your MoBo doesn't have legacy USB support for KBD and mice, adding a PCI one won't necessarily help. I can still only use them after booting into W98.

jwt27 wrote:

Lukeno94 wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Got two Taiwanese 64GB 800x CF cards, seller claimed they support UDMA6 with 120MB/s read and 60MB/s write speeds.
HA! No way. They run in UDMA4 and 40MB/s read and 10MB/s write is the best they can do. Reason enough to return them.

edit: or, maybe not... There's a jumper on the CF adapter to run it at 3.3V. With that set, the controller does detect them as being UDMA6 capable. But now neither DOS or Windows will boot. Any ideas?

Have you reinstalled Windows on them after the change? I could see that a UDMA change could plausibly confuse the OS that much.

There's no Windows on it, in fact there's nothing on it at all (did a Secure Erase after the write test). And the other SSDs work fine in UDMA5 and 6 mode.

When plugged in the mainboard IDE socket at 3.3V, it seems to work at first and both Windows and DOS will boot. But any attempt to access it or run a benchmark crashes right away.

Yeah I know, replying to myself looks stupid, but I got this to work now.

In case anyone likes to know what the problem was:
I used one of those super cheap IDE-CF adapters, the ones with the black circuit board you see everywhere on ebay. These don't have a proper 3.3V regulator, but instead use two diodes to drop the 5V supply to about 3.3V. Each diode has a nominal voltage drop of about 700mV so you'd get about 3.6V which is close enough. Problem with diodes is that the voltage drop depends on how much current you're pulling through them, so the actual supply voltage will fluctuate a bit. To make matters worse these CF adapters have no capacitors to smooth this out, not even a tiny bypass cap!
So in practice, the supply voltage was jumping up and down all over the place between about 3 and 4.5V as the CF card was being accessed, probably enough to make it switch rapidly between the fast 3.3V mode and slow 5V mode.

Solution: solder a wire directly from 3.3V on the PCI IDE controller to the CF adapter. Problem solved 😀
On an interesting side note, hdparm reports that this "UDMA6" CF card is actually UDMA7-capable... And according to HD Tune, it supports the TRIM command too. 😀

Callahan wrote:

A lot of stuff...
That second ati rage with memory daughter board, 4th from Rendition, isn't an mac vga card?

Few days before i flashed bios mac rage128gl to pc version: xpert128 with success, but addon card with extra mem is not visible at all.

Thanks, I do not think it is a MAC version, it worked in my PC without any BIOS modifications 😉

vetz wrote:

He got that NV1 from me. It is a long story, but the BIOS chip was dead, but thanks to Keropi and Varus the card now works

Yes it's true and I am very gratefull for that 😉 You can see some more pictures on my fanpage:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.424 … 42542968&type=1

And here are some comparison photos of Software rendered and D3D renderer in Half Life
http://tufotki.pl/t4epn

Just recieved my A-Open AW320 Sound Card....
Does anyone know what year it is from?

Got SB-Link for DOS compatibility....

Info. If any would like some...

It's complete boxed, and with original driver-cd. 😜

This may be a tremendously stupid question, but I've seen mention all over the board of people going to "recycling centers" or dumpster diving and finding all of this amazing gear.

Is this a primarily urban or European thing? I'm in Pennsylvania in the US and pretty much the only option out here unless you're dealing directly with a scrapping/recycling company (no centers, just straight drop off at their office) is to take your stuff to a Best Buy or other retailer who then have their own channels for recycling.

Am I missing a major source of treasure in my backyard or is this really a regional thing?

Runicen wrote:

This may be a tremendously stupid question, but I've seen mention all over the board of people going to "recycling centers" or dumpster diving and finding all of this amazing gear.

Is this a primarily urban or European thing? I'm in Pennsylvania in the US and pretty much the only option out here unless you're dealing directly with a scrapping/recycling company (no centers, just straight drop off at their office) is to take your stuff to a Best Buy or other retailer who then have their own channels for recycling.

Am I missing a major source of treasure in my backyard or is this really a regional thing?

In Sweden we MUST recycle everything so we have small recycling rooms/buildings in every housing area. The electronic waste dumpster is available for all who lives there and no one really cares if you... ehm rescue stuff... but you are not allowed to if we go strictly by the rules.

The larger recycling centers do have much better drops but they do not allow you to loot.

-

I've never seen anywhere in the UK myself that would be suitable for rescuing junked electronic equipment. Not saying that they don't exist, and there are definitely some people who would put everything in a box and say "free to whoever wants it", however.

Dumpster diving used to be a good way for me to obtain parts, but since then I've moved away from my favorite dumpsterdiving area and most locations now have these underground containers instead of all trash being put on the curb.
Also people don't regard old computers as trash anymore, these days they try to get "some" money from it.
Another thing is ID fraud, people will rather have their computer destroyed then giving it away for fear of ID theft.
Second hand shops here are full of people cherrypicking the good parts so only the real garbage ends up in the shop (like old 235W PSU's with leaking caps).
Theres only one "good" second hand shop and it's not that close to where I live, they never let you see inside before you buy (so you have to guess whats inside) and on top of that, most computers I see have their side panels loosened and the memory modules and harddrives stolen (of course I can't bargain the price down).

For me the best way is to see a couple websites for parts that are cheap and to grab them before anyone else does.

Ow those sweet good times...

I'm sorry to hear that I missed a halcyon era for collecting vintage gear. And yes, it does sound like the EU is a better place for this than the US.

At this point, I'm a bit resigned to either shelling out or hoping that something like Craigslist yields some treasure I can make use of. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing out on some amazing silicon buffet that was lurking just out of sight. 😉

Kinda peed off that my 486 machine can no longer detect the HDD that i was using in it. The HDD spins up and doesn't make any odd noises, but is no longer detected in the bios. I've tried a different cable and diferent I/O card but no avail. Kinda annoyed. I wanted to test out my copies of OS/2 on it, and also my boxed copy of TurboLinux 6.

Runicen wrote:

I'm sorry to hear that I missed a halcyon era for collecting vintage gear. And yes, it does sound like the EU is a better place for this than the US.

At this point, I'm a bit resigned to either shelling out or hoping that something like Craigslist yields some treasure I can make use of. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing out on some amazing silicon buffet that was lurking just out of sight. 😉

Theres always a period where stuff from a certain generation is easy to find. Atm it's P4 and perhaps XP and A64. Earlier stuff is getting harder to find now and newer stuff is still too new to be gotten for cheaps easily and in quantity.

You also have to keep in mind that back when I was dumpsterdiving for parts, everyone called me nuts for getting all this old junk from the streets, some people even said it would make me depressed. There was no-way I could've known this stuff would become wanted again, was a total surprise for me.
I wasn't gifted with foresight, I was just lucky things turned out the way that they did.

Blurredman wrote:

Kinda peed off that my 486 machine can no longer detect the HDD that i was using in it. The HDD spins up and doesn't make any odd noises, but is no longer detected in the bios. I've tried a different cable and diferent I/O card but no avail. Kinda annoyed. I wanted to test out my copies of OS/2 on it, and also my boxed copy of TurboLinux 6.

Did the CHS settings are set manually to the exact values or are you using a DDO with random CHS ?
You can also test the drive on another computer with a USB/IDE adapter if you have one (that's the fastest way to tell if an HDD is completely dead), if not just slave it on an existing IDE cable.

Blurredman wrote:

Kinda peed off that my 486 machine can no longer detect the HDD that i was using in it. The HDD spins up and doesn't make any odd noises, but is no longer detected in the bios. I've tried a different cable and diferent I/O card but no avail. Kinda annoyed. I wanted to test out my copies of OS/2 on it, and also my boxed copy of TurboLinux 6.

Nice thing about Linux is it will probably run on it with slightly bigger/newer hdd anyway without the bios seeing it correctly. Might need to initialize boot via the floppy drive first though.

Talking about dumpster diving I remembered that here at the university people just started dumping stuff at the door of our division's building... I found 1 broken LPX socket 5 board, 1 non-working S7 board, 1 ATX case with ATX mounting holes and 1 socket 478 board with a heatsink, but a broken cooler (and no P4). Too bad that recently they removed everything and noone dumps anything here anymore. I just loved waiting untill it was late enough so there wouldn't be a lot of people thinking I'm a weirdo and look around, even if I didn't find anything.

The broken boards are still stored at uni, I brought the case and 478 MoBo home:

The PSU is new... I bought a cheap case to assemble my old i3 for my brother and it came with a crappy 200W PSU (with 25 A in the 5V line). Guess it could be used for an old build. Since the case was already taking the space, I decided to stick it in there. I'm still unsure about what to do with it... I've got no love for P4s, and already have a working Athlon 64 3000+. Maybe I could use it as a base for a "late Win98" build, but I'd rather have a P3 for that. I'm tempted to buy some 478 P4 just to test the board though, and then just forget it in my closet. The case has AT mounting holes though, That might be useful.

A crappy 200W PSU and a P4 is a bad idea. Even a good Dell 160W unit (which is probably better in practice for a P4 than that) begins to whine quite noticeably under high load, so that one would probably blow up. I certainly wouldn't put it anywhere near an Athlon64 3000+ CPU.

Oh, no, I'm not planning on using that PSU with a P4. I just put it in that case to save space. My Athlon 64 is alive and kicking on the case I originally bought it with, paired with a 400W PSU.

I've been collecting 386 and 486 generation hardware since the mid 90s. When I first started out a lot of people were still using 486 systems and were quite reluctant to give up their high end gear. Most stuff was still relatively expensive too. Then around 2000 everything was plentiful and dirt cheap. The only problem was that on ebay half the time you couldn't tell what you were buying because most people didn't own digital camera. Ever since then prices have been on the rise and parts have been drying up. Until recently I was always able to find many things online that I really wanted but couldn't afford to buy them all. There was a time I could search for "ISA card" on eBay and would get so many pages of results it was pretty much impossible to scan through everything. These days searching online is pretty depressing and I rarely see anything worth buying. What we need is a good economic crisis to get people pawning stuff off on eBay again.