Bought a couple of cheap clone 6-button gamepads for my Sega Mega Drive.

They're certainly not going to win any awards as far as usability, but I'm having some friends around an evening this week and wanted something quick & cheap for 2-player 6-button action. These will suffice. 🤣

Also bought a Sony Playstation, with: 2 controllers, a memory card & 2 games, plus an RGB Scart cable. This filled a bit of a hole in my collection, I'd never owned any consoles from that generation as I'd switched to PC gaming by that point, but did play on them at friends' houses. I only had consoles from the generation after that myself by sheer luck, mostly due to my brother owning them and I hardly ever played them.

PTherapist wrote:

Jed118 wrote:

^^^ I seem to recall BTC CDROMS ejecting discs still spinning. This year I got a P166 with a 10x BTC CDROM and yeah, I recalled correctly.

Excellent driver software package though, I've been using it for 20+ years on all my retro builds (same diskette, too!)

Haha that reminds me, I had a couple of drives do that, one may have indeed been the same brand. The worst culprit though was an old DVD-ROM drive where pressing eject was nerve-wracking, if you were lucky it wouldn't fly out spinning towards you. Always reminded me of that movie Dark Angel/I Come in Peace. 🤣

I've worked on a few computers where the drive spun the CD so fast that it exploded... also had a few different drives back in the day that would not spin the disc down when you pressed the eject button.

I had one drive myself that was just spinning the disc faster and faster around the same time I had already worked on machines that had exploded the discs. I was able to eject it before the disc exploded.

Fun times.

PTherapist wrote:

Jed118 wrote:

^^^ I seem to recall BTC CDROMS ejecting discs still spinning. This year I got a P166 with a 10x BTC CDROM and yeah, I recalled correctly.

Excellent driver software package though, I've been using it for 20+ years on all my retro builds (same diskette, too!)

Haha that reminds me, I had a couple of drives do that, one may have indeed been the same brand. The worst culprit though was an old DVD-ROM drive where pressing eject was nerve-wracking, if you were lucky it wouldn't fly out spinning towards you. Always reminded me of that movie Dark Angel/I Come in Peace. 🤣

LOOOL actually, this particular BTC that I had in the 90s spat out my friend's disc (Heroes of Might and Magic II - I still have the disc) and scratched it in such a way that it would not work in his computer but would in mine. I offered to swap CDROMS (he had a 2x, mine was 16x, I think the reasons for the no-go on the swap was that he had his 2X driven right off a Mitsumi interface on a sound card and had no IDE channels left) but no, I had to get a replacement CD. I got to keep the old disc though, and I still use it 😉 I went through a relapse of HOMM a couple years ago with that game.

The drive is also very noisy and vibrated quite a bit - I remember distinctly teenager me pressing the eject button (perhaps one too many High Sierra DOS errors) furiously and yeah, it ejected the CD-R alright - during a full spin cycle the tray opened, disc fully spinning above the tray (IIRC 20 years ago), on an eccentric orbit, then one edge finally touched the tray and WHOOSH - the disc flew across the room and shattered against a wall.

BTC CDROM, thank you for the memories.

Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB.... notice the length of the PCB, other gf2 gts 32mb cards are usualy smaller in size, this model perhaps built on a GF3 platform?

Bought a Chinese Thinkpad power brick for $5, and a PS/2 header for ASUS boards for $3. Excuse the text - seller pics.

Real Thinkpad power brick for the 600E I found in a throwout pile outside apartments was too expensive (relative to how much I wanted to spend on something I found), so $5 for either a used or pretty nice looking clone with good reviews, which can't be worse than any generic laptop PSU power brick is fine by me.

The PS/2 header is for my MMX build in signature, so I can use my IntelliMouse Optical 1.1A on it. Buying one on eBay was around $7.50 + $25 intl. shipping, so $3 for a less professional but fully functional one is fine by me. The material and time to make that myself would have been more than $3.

x0zm_ wrote:

Bought a Chinese Thinkpad power brick for $5, and a PS/2 header for ASUS boards for $3. Excuse the text - seller pics. […]
Show full quote

Bought a Chinese Thinkpad power brick for $5, and a PS/2 header for ASUS boards for $3. Excuse the text - seller pics.

Real Thinkpad power brick for the 600E I found in a throwout pile outside apartments was too expensive (relative to how much I wanted to spend on something I found), so $5 for either a used or pretty nice looking clone with good reviews, which can't be worse than any generic laptop PSU power brick is fine by me.

The PS/2 header is for my MMX build in signature, so I can use my IntelliMouse Optical 1.1A on it. Buying one on eBay was around $7.50 + $25 intl. shipping, so $3 for a less professional but fully functional one is fine by me. The material and time to make that myself would have been more than $3.

Be careful with that Chinese power brick. I bought a Chinese one for my Pentium IV Toshiba laptop and not only does it run super duper hot, it even has a small fan to probably keep it from catching on fire.

I opened it up to see what was inside and it is a super crazy cheap design.

It works, but I have only used it a couple times because it makes me scared to think of what would happen if it shorted out.

Luckily I finally located the original power brick which had been lost by the person that gave it to me a few years ago. I ended up finding it in a drawer in their old office after they were no longer working there.

cyclone3d wrote:

Be careful with that Chinese power brick. I bought a Chinese one for my Pentium IV Toshiba laptop and not only does it run super duper hot, it even has a small fan to probably keep it from catching on fire.

Oh yeah, I don't plan on using it full time. Just enough to make sure it works well enough to justify sinking more money into the real deal. 🤣

Bige4u wrote:

Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB.... notice the length of the PCB, other gf2 gts 32mb cards are usualy smaller in size, this model perhaps built on a GF3 platform?

in the first part of 2000? 😀 i dont think so... it has a dvi version too, maybe this the reason. at those time the dvi was very uncommon.

Bought these (retro) hardware today

Well, I just managed to get the bigger sister of the Winner 1000...

ELSA WINNER 2000 TwinBus (4MB VRAM S3 928 EISA/ISA with 170Mhz Ramdac)

Madowax wrote:

Bought these (retro) hardware today […]
Show full quote

Bought these (retro) hardware today

Well, I just managed to get the bigger sister of the Winner 1000...

ELSA WINNER 2000 TwinBus (4MB VRAM S3 928 EISA/ISA with 170Mhz Ramdac)

Oh wow,if I ever get my 386EISA board going, I'll know what to look for.

XFX 7950 GT 610M 512MB. I do like these passively cooled cards, I've had a vendetta against loud fans ever since I bought a Sapphire 4870 over a decade ago, that thing was incredibly loud.

Madowax wrote:

Well, I just managed to get the bigger sister of the Winner 1000...

ELSA WINNER 2000 TwinBus (4MB VRAM S3 928 EISA/ISA with 170Mhz Ramdac)

Nice find!

(Also, why do people quote pictures in posts all the times, especially when their reply is on the same page with the post they're replying to?)

AlaricD wrote:

Madowax wrote:

Well, I just managed to get the bigger sister of the Winner 1000...

ELSA WINNER 2000 TwinBus (4MB VRAM S3 928 EISA/ISA with 170Mhz Ramdac)

Nice find!

(Also, why do people quote pictures in posts all the times, especially when their reply is on the same page with the post they're replying to?)

Because the quote function doesn't automatically remove them? Sure you can edit it out manually, but how many people going to take the time to do that?

cyclone3d wrote:

Sure you can edit it out manually, but how many people going to take the time to do that?

Not enough, apparently.

I visited this forum before and saw a post by cyclone3d about Atlona AT-HD500 and immediately got one my self. It finally arrived today! Had to order from USA so the postage and customs got higher than the item itself. I got mine unused. It still had the "factory" smell when I took HD500 from it's bubble wrap. I no longer need to use DVI connector that had lots of issues with games or Sewell Hammerhead VGA-HDMI converter. I was able to use only 640x480 resolution with that. I upscaled the image to 720p to work with old Intensity Pro capture card with cheap ebay HD Video Converter (scaler). No support for 720x400 resolution with that. So I was using DVI to HDMI and Sewell for 640x480 sometimes. DVI had to be downscaled with the ebay thingie as well because my Graphics card wanted to output 1080p through DVI and my capture card supported only 1080i and 720p.

Some games that have 640x480 resolution give me black image now If I hook them directly from AT-HD500 to Intensity Pro. Just some. AT2, Syndicate, Flashback. However Micro Machines 2 and Crusader work and they also have 640x480 resolution. If I connect ebay chinese HD Video Converter in between I get no issues but the image gets too bright. Also If I connect MS-DOS image with At-HD500 to my TV, there are no issues at all and it looks okay.

Perhaps my Intensity Pro capture card is the one being finicky and should finally be replaced. I think I bought it around 2008. I will buy new capture card in the far future but for now, this is already very good. Most games work with this setup and I can start making YouTube game videos with better quality now.

RegTheEvil wrote:

I visited this forum before and saw a post by cyclone3d about Atlona AT-HD500 and immediately got one my self. It finally arrived today! Had to order from USA so the postage and customs got higher than the item itself. I got mine unused. It still had the "factory" smell when I took HD500 from it's bubble wrap. I no longer need to use DVI connector that had lots of issues with games or Sewell Hammerhead VGA-HDMI converter. I was able to use only 640x480 resolution with that. I upscaled the image to 720p to work with old Intensity Pro capture card with cheap ebay HD Video Converter (scaler). No support for 720x400 resolution with that. So I was using DVI to HDMI and Sewell for 640x480 sometimes. DVI had to be downscaled with the ebay thingie as well because my Graphics card wanted to output 1080p through DVI and my capture card supported only 1080i and 720p.

Some games that have 640x480 resolution give me black image now If I hook them directly from AT-HD500 to Intensity Pro. Just some. AT2, Syndicate, Flashback. However Micro Machines 2 and Crusader work and they also have 640x480 resolution. If I connect ebay chinese HD Video Converter in between I get no issues but the image gets too bright. Also If I connect MS-DOS image with At-HD500 to my TV, there are no issues at all and it looks okay.

Perhaps my Intensity Pro capture card is the one being finicky and should finally be replaced. I think I bought it around 2008. I will buy new capture card in the far future but for now, this is already very good. Most games work with this setup and I can start making YouTube game videos with better quality now.

Yeah.. the Atlona is pretty good. It isn't perfect though as you have found.

When I was in my frenzy of looking for a really good converter I ended up buying a couple other higher end converters that actually let you create your own resolutions with whatever timings you want and save them in the unit itself. I haven't really played around with them at all since I first got them except for messing around with the software to set custom settings.

That's what I get for having way too many projects going on.

Club3D HD 3850 with Apack ZEROtherm cooler

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Club3D HD 3850 with Apack ZEROtherm cooler

What do you plan on pairing it with?

Take this extension for my amiga for the option to 2 meg chipram.

Her in doors is aware today so I entered her inner sanctum, the garage, where she carries out her wood working projects. Gave it a good tidy up. She isn't terribly organized so you can imagine the state it was in. Anyway after about 3 hours and a full rubbish bin I got finished. I know I'll get an ear full when she gets home.

To reward myself I had another rummage through my storage boxes. In the last box at the bottom of the stack was the Acorn A3000 I bought some time ago. Pleased as punch I am, the hard work was worth the effort. Another thing I found was an ISA Adaptic AHA-1520/22 scsi controller with support for scsi hdds and standard fdds. It originally had came out of my 386DX25 system. The 100meg Apple branded scsi hdd that was in it had died and I had no other scsi drives to replace it with at the time. I pulled the card and put it in storage. In it's place I installed a standard multi i/o with hdd support and a 4gig Bigfoot hdd using EZDrive DDO for drive translation. Over that time and now I had at some stage stripped an Intergraph Pentium Pro system running XP. It had two scsi hdds and scsi CDRom drive. The sizes of the hard rives are 2.1 and 9.1gig and the cable is about four foot long with external mini scsi conversion board and connector attached. I'll check the scsi card in a 486 system at some as I've never had to deal with it in the past. If my memory is correct it booted from its own bios.

Other items were a brand new Pine VLB multi i/o card, some serial mice and a 12 to 9-pin vga cable that use to be attached to the 14" 28 dot pitch vga monitor back in the early 90s which was connected to my old 286/16. That'll be used on the A3000.