What retro things have you done today?

Soldato
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Not confident in repairing my S3 virge I was watching a few on ebay just in case. Cheeky bid on this one and it was won for £1.20. More than enough for the 486 its going in.



Interestingly the seller was Ctrl.Alt.Rees from youtube
 
Soldato
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Damn, hes the 2nd youtuber I have dealt with on ebay (nostalgia nerd the other). Both times were not brilliant experiences.

Going to build up that 486 tonight and test everything out before I try and do a build vid on it. Waiting for some 12% peroxide to turn up. Going to retrobrite my optical intellimouse too.
 
Soldato
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Didnt get round to doing the build. Decided to solder some power wires to the turbo display and see if it works. Ended up wasting about 45minutes thinking my PSU was dead when actually the power cable I was using had a blown fuse!!

Anyway.. It works and was displaying 10. I didnt have the switch wired up to see what its other speed was displaying.

Fortunately its a known model so will be easy to set up to say LO/HI

 
Soldato
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Went back to the build in the end... Just putting it all together and trying to go further than just the POST screen for the first time. Which was actually not happening. At first I was trying a CF card but had trouble getting it detected. I think it was actually the IDE cable not fully inserted to the board.. Doh! But it still would not progress from the POST screen so I went and found a 500mb hard drive which was detected fine but still would not move onto booting.

I remembered from another build with fake/faulty cache that it would also stick here if it was set wrong so after double checking the cache jumpers were correct I tried disabling L2 in the bios but that did not help
So then I disabled L1.. And that fixed it.

Fortunately this board does support the WB dx4 so after some messing around with jumpers (I had overlooked a jumper for about 10 minutes wondering why it wasnt working as expected..) it is now running as expected.

I will probably leave it now until the case has been restored. Need to retrobrite the plastics, remove rust from the metal and also possibly respray the shell.

These damn builds always take so much time! Its gone 1am and I am up at 6 to go bargain hunting.
 
Soldato
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@LewisRaz what a saga. It's gone 6am. What bargains have you found?

I was at the South West Amiga Meet yesterday. It's good to be back. My camera showpiece worked. I took pictures on the Sony Mavica floppy drive camera, converted them to .IFF on a PC. And copied them back to the Amiga and displayed them using ViewTek software.

On other desks, there were Amiga 1000s, CD32s, Amiga 4000s and a crafty MISTer hidden inside an Atari ST casing.
 
Soldato
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Came back empty handed :(

Saw a couple of interesting bits but nothing work getting. Most notably a Pentium 3 packard bell laptop, no charger and untested asking £20! No thanks.

The Amiga meet sounds fun. Are they quite large or is it a fairly small thing?
 
Soldato
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It is fun. A lot of nerdy people chatting Amiga.

If you search on YouTube for South West Amiga meet, you can see footage of previous events.

It's a village hall, so reasonably small in numbers.

The January meet is the big one with raffle and guest speakers.
 
Soldato
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@LewisRaz I was an avid car boot attendee.

The best ever one I went to was over near Dartford one August bank holiday weekend. It was massive.

I've got no room for any more equipment, but I enjoyed the odd bargain around Wiltshire from MegaDrive game pads for 50p to a disk box full of 3.5 disks for a pound. The odd PC / Console game here and there, but I've got enough to last the rest of my life. :p

I started looking for problems to the solution of the stuff I saw at the sales.

I really need to start selling bits. :o I have probably stuff everyone needs to complete their collections.
 
Soldato
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@!bluetonic! I really enjoy them but these days the resellers are getting wiser and wiser so bargains and gems are hard to come buy. Retro consoles/games you have no chance. My local resellers have also figured out big box PC games mostly too.

I also think we are nearing the time when this stuff is just generally not being sold anymore as its all been moved on years ago or binned. I've spoken to a few people who just tossed old PCs and software because it was "old and nobody could possibly want it". I got my big box copy of the sims from a bootsale and he had about 20 loose jewel cases of many other good games. He asked me why I ignored those ones and only got the sims and I mentioned I'm more interested in the boxes than the actual CDs. His reply was "OMG I tossed those boxes to pack them into the car as I didnt think anyone would want them"....

Still, I am able to get the occasional bits of hardware. cant forget my socket 7 motherboard with SLI voodoo 2s fitted for £20.
I watch a local youtuber who is a bootsale reseller and he once got an amstrad 286 complete with monitor and keyboard for £20. The day I did not go! I think there is a little bit of FOMO involved now too because of that.
 
Associate
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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).

I just love CPU heatsinks/coolers in general, but the old ones for Socket A and 478 are my favourites. I managed to collect a few over the years, here's some that I got pictures taken:


The Swiftech MCX462


Thermaltake SLK 600 or 700, not sure.


Another Thermaltake


Thermaltake Volcano 11+


Thermalright XP-120,I think it's the first CPU cooler for 120mm fans. Socket 478


Another Themaltake for Socket 478


A couple Zalman heatsinks


And a few other coolers


I hope one day to test them all, in a fair environment with similar fans, to check their performance. For now they sit in boxes at my parents home.
You can check this website, I found it very useful in finding the model numbers and the looking for them on ebay: http://www.dansdata.com/coolercomp_p6.htm#slk700

Also, what host image site are you using to upload images so that it goes into full screen and not opening a different tab? :)
 
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Soldato
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10 Dec 2004
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Oxfordshire
I had the Thermalright XP120 on my Athlon XP build years ago. Phenomenal heatsink. had my 2500+ mobile at over 3200+ speeds and still was crazily cool and quiet.

Wasn't a cheap piece of kit, but worth the money!

I have still yet to locate myself an Asus Star Ice!
 
Soldato
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Because of space, time and could do with the funds I think that I am going to have to scale down my collection of stuff sadly.

Most likely be a load of stuff up on MM soon. Socket 754 full build will be first up:(
 
Associate
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Location
Cirencester
I had the Thermalright XP120 on my Athlon XP build years ago. Phenomenal heatsink. had my 2500+ mobile at over 3200+ speeds and still was crazily cool and quiet.

Wasn't a cheap piece of kit, but worth the money!

I have still yet to locate myself an Asus Star Ice!

You reminded me I took more pictures of some stuff I checked in the boxes at my parents house during holiday.
I found the Asus Star Ice on marketplace a few years ago. I haven't see one since.
 
Associate
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Oh wow! Yeah I saw one on Christmas Eve of all times a year or so ago on ebay and it sold before I got a chance to grab it.

They are monsterous but so cool :D

Yes, they are COOL :D, that's why I ended up collecting loads of them. Due to lack of space too I had to send almost all my stuff to my parents house. They got plenty of space, I'm afraid I'll be ending up collecting more stuff. I don't like when I have to sell something, especially if I created a connection with that item.
 
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