What retro things have you done today?

Done a bit of good old fashion case modding with a Dremel today. Wanted to try and add some airflow to this AT case, and I also switched out the AT Power supply for a FSP 250watt PSU. It wouldn't fit with the PSU cut out the case had as it was orientated for AT PSU's. Cut out part of the plate to allow the ATX psu in the correct orientation.

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Also added a 120mm Gentle Typhoon fan at the front. It's running at full speed but it relatively quiet and pushes out some air!

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Should hopefully keep everything nice and cool.
 
I've reassembled one of the PCs and tested the drives. Two 17GB and a 70GB drive, pretty useful for my Windows 98 PCs! I've never used SCSI before.

One drive is password protected and one doesn't have a boot... thingy so I assume that one was just a storage drive. The other 17GB one isn't password protected and has an XP install on it. I'm installing XP on the password protected one at the moment with my 7600GS and the audiophile card it came with. I might be nosy and have a look around the other drives...

It's got an inhale and exhaust 120mm fan, quite unusual for the time when it was built (it has 2003 dated drives and a 2002 QA pass stamp), plus a more typical 1million rpm 80mm inhale fan too. I might get a couple of Noctua 60mm fans for the CPUs though.

I'll build up the other PC too I guess as its currently in bits drying outside!
 
Fiddled around with a 486 board I got a while back that the seller sent in a jiffy bag.It kept hanging randomly. Gave it a good hour of messing around before I gave up. When I took it out of the case the board looked like a banana so that probably explains a lot.

My bag of scrap is starting to get some good weight!
 
LewisRaz said:
Fiddled around with a 486 board I got a while back that the seller sent in a jiffy bag.It kept hanging randomly. Gave it a good hour of messing around before I gave up. When I took it out of the case the board looked like a banana so that probably explains a lot.

My bag of scrap is starting to get some good weight!
Click to expand...

Couldn't be anything memory related? You tried it with just an ISA vga card?
 
cee-S-dee said:
Couldn't be anything memory related? You tried it with just an ISA vga card?
Click to expand...
On my initial testing it was hanging at the exact same point with just an ISA vga :(

Installed DOS fine but would hang every single time I told it where to install the mouse drivers.

Just stops loading with a blinking cursor.

This time round I was only trying to boot from a win98 boot floppy so I could partition a HDD but it would hang at the exact same moment every time.

I though the CPU might be overheating as it (SX 50) was too hot to touch at all, but even after adding a heatsink it was the same.
 
Why am I still spending money on this stupid dual CPU build!? The two PCs cost £40 for the pair. Now I've bought 2x 2.7GHz Xeon CPUs (£11.30), then a bunch of fans (£30) and now I'm looking at faster AGP GPUs and a PCI SATA card!

I've swapped in an IDE drive which for some reason wouldn't install XP (after the copying set up files bit I just got NDTLR is missing) but Windows 7 installs fine. I installed W7 Home Premium from my normal disk and it only picks up 1 CPU... I then reinstalled 7 Professional (which allows 2 CPUs) 32 bit (as the CPUs are not 64-bit capable!) after luckily I found a disk for it at the bottom of my Box of Many Things. The SCSI drive sounds like a washing machine.

It's loud, its enormous, it's stupid, its hot, it's slow. The RD-RAM is really hot and is right next to my passive and equally as hot 7600GS AGP. After installing Windows 7 the gpu was 97c apparently.
 
LewisRaz said:
On my initial testing it was hanging at the exact same point with just an ISA vga :(

Installed DOS fine but would hang every single time I told it where to install the mouse drivers.

Just stops loading with a blinking cursor.

This time round I was only trying to boot from a win98 boot floppy so I could partition a HDD but it would hang at the exact same moment every time.

I though the CPU might be overheating as it (SX 50) was too hot to touch at all, but even after adding a heatsink it was the same.
Click to expand...

Found the correct manual for this board this morning and its possible I was running my sx50 at 66mhz. Could explain the hanging..
 
Yea it was at 5v. I also tried my dx4 for a long time but was getting a post code error saying something about cannot set clockspeed. Turns out that board does not support AMD dx4s... I also had a minor panic when I saw my dx4 wanted 3v and I was giving it 3.3v but apparently thats OK.
 
Either way I would go for it, the cooler on that 754/939 board looks pretty substantial and could be useful (even if modern am2/3 coolers can fit). The 9600 is probably worth £20 on eBay itself. The gold card looks like an mx2 of some kind but the composite output is at least slightly interesting.
 
I decided to convert one the Fujitsu Siemens cases into a more generic PC case. This was harder than it looked:

Started like this:

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Removed the various metal framework - the RAM card front bumper thing, the lower card protection door thingy, the lower front fan cover
Removed the old part-working CD Drives including their rail thingies
Remove floppy drive from the other PC and install in this one, so it has two (the other PC now has both green front panel blank plates things, so it doesn't need the HDD cage at all)
I have 6 drive bays to fill (two cases). I have rails for four drives and I have two faceplates. One build however will use both a faceplate and the a rail (mounting a 3.5" bay in the 5.25" bay) so I electrical tape one of the dead drives in place!
Remove heatsinks and mounting plate so I can remove the the old motherboard
Remove the Socket 603 heatsink mounting holes that are part of the chassis and stick out as much or more than the standoffs
relocate standoffs
(re)install front and rear 120mm fans
Remove PSU (it's enormous!)
Put ATX bracket onto SFF PSU
Put AT bracket on ATX bracket onto SFF PSU
Install SFF PSU (It's tiny!)
Realise the power button connector is all one blob and is non standard. Separate out the power button using stanley knife
Realise the power switch is not long enough to reach the motherboard, order a new one (and pwr and HDD LEDS) from eBay.
Mount motherboard, GPU etc
Faff about with poorly seated RAM and the PC remembering its overclock (despite clearing the CMOS twice) that I was very keen to avoid given the SFF PSU is not that powerful
Install Windows 7 yay

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(this is fine!)

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I trialled it with my 1156 motherboard as it is (usually) pretty reliable - just because it's the biggest I have, and it still looks reasonably proportioned in there!

Not sure what to actually put in it now. Maybe I'll get a 754 motherboard. Annoyingly it doesn't have AT mounting points which I thought it would given the PSU situation.
 
Received a board and CPU today from a trade with a fellow forum member.
Got on with the current (AND FINAL!!) Iteration of my "dream 486"... Which has slowly become very far from a 486.

This build went so smooth it was almost not believable. The only trouble I had was a "hot electronic" smell which I had noticed from the last build in this case. Lucky I noticed the PSU fan had got some polystyrene jammed in it so that was an easy fix.

Here is the case I have posted over and over still not retrobrited but showing the correct cpu speed :)



Final specs:
P166MMX
64mb EDO
2mb S3 Virge/DX
4mb Voodoo 1
Soundblaster awe32
2gb HDD for OS but also for nostalgia noises.
2gb CF for easy file transfer.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RARE-CLA...e=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2060353.m1431.l2649 <- this if I win it.

This build is DONE now (apart from retrobrite). I expect to be quoted on that next time I change it.. :)

The performance is absolutely where I want it to be. Even finished the first couple of missions on G-Police quite happily.
 
Sounds like it turned out to be a great build @LewisRaz. If you can snag that SW60XG for a nice price it will deffo be an awesome addition. I have 2 of those cards and one actually in my MMX build and they sound so awesome. My old build wasn't to dis-similar to the one you just put together now.
 
I saw one sold recently for £65 so I will bid that and see...

Been off work again today and still cannot get a covid test so used my time to play DK and TTD on the 166.



I do need to clean this area up really :D
 
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