What retro things have you done today?

Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,719
Location
North Essex
Managed to get some time to mess around with the 486 board again. I tested the Transistor in isolation and it worked fine! So the short was somewhere else..

If i check for continuity between any 5v rails/pins and ground I am getting a reading of 0.769V. Could that be dodgy caps?
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,719
Location
North Essex
I assume you mean a reading in ohms, not volts?

Certainly seems shorted if you’re seeing under 1K to ground. First culprit would be any tantalum caps if there are any.
Actually being half asleep I still had it in diode mode:


Once I stopped being stupid and just fitted the new BD131:


DX4 @ 3.3v

Cant work out why the old one now works out of circuit but dont care. The motherboard is working fine now! :)

The next problem is my VGA card randomly dropping signal and then coming back - This is deffo the card as it done it on my last system but I blamed it on the system not the card.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,719
Location
North Essex
@LewisRaz, nice one, no better feeling than fixing some hardware yourself :)

What’s the issue with the video? Any symptoms other than dropping out? Does it come back again?

Thanks for your help mate if it was not for your advice(And that other hero from your thread on vogons) I would not have got it working again!

Yep, always comes back. Works as normal but quite often the whole signal drops out then comes back. Does not seem like a loose VGA cable type of issue, there are quite a few caps on the board but they look "ok". The main chip does seem to have some legs that are shiny and some that are dull? Its an odd one. Certainly not a valuable card but I will mess around with it a bit before writing it off as I am trying to keep the build cost as low as possible!
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,493
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Very odd, I’ve never heard of a fully functioning card randomly drop out and come back of its own accord. Certainly sounds plausible that it’s a faulty cap causing a temporary outage of some signal or voltage rail, I’m wondering if it’s RAMDAC related. What kind of display are you using, CRT or LCD? If the latter, does the display drop into one of those “out of sync” errors? If it’s the former, is there any display activity at all, a line, a dot? Both of those would be symptoms of a loss of clock sync either horizontal or vertical or both.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
Posts
19,885
This arrived the other day which will eventually replace my retro desktop and CRT which I taking up too much space

Dell Inspiron 8100.
Fantastic condition and currently putting it through its paces.
Making an excellent Win98SE retro gaming machine thats a beast of a laptop for 2001.
P3 933, 512MB Ram, Geforce 2 Go 32MB, DVD RW, Floppy and battery which holds good for around 1.5 hours of gaming (Max Payne and Unreal Tournament)

Unfortunately the poor ESS Maestro 3i driver support isnt the best so not yet managed to get VXD drivers working, only the WDM drivers. This means DOS games/apps do not launch at all. Ive managed to sort that ESSAUDIO.com and ini files with autoexec and config.sys setting soundblaster options but this then screws Windows config. Most games I play on my retro rig can be played in Win98 DOS prompt (Duke 3d, Blood, Settlers 2, Transport Tycoon, Rise of the triad...) and the ESS does a reasonable job when setting Waveblaster for Music which works perfectly. Its no full ISA OPL3 Soundblaster like in my retro rig but good enough.

I thought I would see how far I can take this 2001 laptop, so played Half Life 2 for 30 mins. 800 x 600, medium settings nets around 20-30fps most of the time. I'm surprised that a laptop from 2001 can play Half life 2 at all! ...Farcry... Crysis?? Watch this space :D

DuhCf8t.jpg.png

iIeS31x.jpg.png

1HqvOrG.jpg.png

QmzAa4V.jpg.png

SWmBlqr.jpg.png

ilvhMIm.jpg.png

p30vssP.jpg.png

Mobil 1 Rally Championship
VNpxrxz.jpg.png
 
Associate
Joined
5 Nov 2002
Posts
2,040
Location
Manchester
Those are awesome, I hope you get them working. They bring back so many memories :)

I have the Greenhouse one of those. It's pretty cool, and the difficulty grows VERY quickly!

Happy to say they both work! They are both easier than I remember them, with the main challenge being patience! Although I suspect if I play longer they will speed up.

Bring back lots of memories playing, mostly when travelling - amazing to think one simple game could keep me occupied for a 3 hour car journey. Now when travelling with work I can rarely decide what to play!
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Nov 2005
Posts
3,020
Location
Swindon, UK
I like the laptops. They unfortunately hold no nostalgia for me as I could never afford laptops of that calibre on their release. It's good to see them and thanks for sharing.

It's the South West Amiga meet next Saturday.

I'm testing my setup.
PXL-20210829-085918711.jpg


It's been recapped with a new keyboard membrane. It's a simple setup this time around with taking photos on the Sony Mavica and getting them onto the Amiga.

Unfortunately, the camera only likes HD disks at 1.44 MB.

So we'll be using my laptop, floppy adapter, CF adapter and an image viewer to convert from JPG to IFF.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
Posts
19,885
Nice, that Amiga looks really clean. There an A1200 on eBay at the moment for £1750 :eek:

I had a A500+ with a 1mb upgrade as a child. Purchased 2nd hand for around £100 with joysticks, games, the upgrade and some programs. Many hours spend on that in the early - mid 90s
 
Soldato
Joined
12 May 2011
Posts
6,143
Location
Southampton
I tried setting up that capture card I bought a few weeks ago. I got it to work this time.

It turns out it can't capture video - only stills. It also can't capture VGA, only S-Video and Compsite with a VGA pass-through cable from the video card into this capture card and out to my monitor. It comes bundled with 'a photoshop' a video / slideshow editor that only seems to want to output .wavs and a digital morphing tool that merges one photo into another (like LGR covered a while back but not animal based). It's still kind of cool seeing my Dreamcast through Windows 3.1, with no perceptible delay either. I had pass-through sound through the AWE32 line in.

It needs Windows 3.1 to be running at 800x600 256 colour mode which makes my 3.1 compatible video card a bit pointless (until I came to "photoshop" the screenshots I'd taken at which point I bumped it back up to 1024 *768 64k colour).

PXL-20210830-131631391.jpg


PXL-20210830-143754412.jpeg


This was the end result. I have not used photoshop before (whether from 1994 or current!)
HHP.jpg


Then I got distracted and played some Aladdin. Forgot how catchy the Level 1 song was!
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,493
Location
Leafy Cheshire
After a year of searching I've finally got hold of my favorite Socket A CPU cooler. The Alpha PAL8045. Back in the day this thing was a behemoth, fantastic heat dissipation and looks so industrially hefty.

ALPHA-PAL-8045-1.jpg


ALPHA-PAL-8045-2.jpg


ALPHA-PAL-8045-3.jpg


Period review here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/825/4

Back in the day (when I didn't care about the volume coming from my fans!) I ran one of these with an 80mm Delta EHE (70+ CFM fan).
 
Don
Joined
19 May 2012
Posts
17,057
Location
Spalding, Lincolnshire
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,493
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Where did you get the AlphaPal 8045? I had one back in the day, great cooler. I’ve had an eBay notification set up for one for a while now waiting in hope!
Indeed it was an eBay notification, I was quite surprised!

There’s currently a German seller who has both a 6035 (socket 370) and an 8045, but neither are… cheap.
 
Back
Top Bottom