What retro things have you done today?

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today.

I was quite worried because a vogons user had pointed out that it looked like they had been worked on before. The seller is indeed selling of bucketloads of old "untested" gear so could possibly be returns or broken parts from and old IT company...

I tried the interesting one first and sure enough it was dead. Only went through 2 or 3 post codes then stopped. Something about "cache or memory count".

I took 1 of the included sticks out and it did the same. However when I swapped it into the other slot we got much further with the posting!

It was now stopping on "init display" but it was actually outputting a blank screen to my monitor now.. I tried a few things before thinking that if it had memory issues before, and the display uses that memory also then perhaps a different stick would sort it out...



Great success!!

Oh and during the fault finding I did have to peek under the heatsink to see what I was dealing with. I wast thinking P100 or similar as I could only see the ceramic edge but:



That will do nicely! :)

Going to try and grab one of those cases that almoststew used and make a nice little MATX win95/DOS machine.(Although installing 98 on it now for stress testing)

The other board actually worked straight after a bios reset. Generic intel board with a 1.8ghz P4 CPU.
 
Just got my modded ZX81, which has a composite video mod, 32k RAM, and a modern ULA replacement which can do high-resolution graphics. Trouble is it turns out it doesn't display a decent picture on my old commodore CTR monitor which I was planning to use it on, but it does on a more modern CRT portable TV.

Also due to the way the ZX81 handles the picture, even with a composite mod and a ULA which generates the correct signals, modern TVs can't sync onto the screen while tape loading, so you get a blank screen while loading instead of the classic black and white loading bars which is a shame. :(

It does however give an excellent picture on the TV, and works perfectly to load and play the old games. I've been having fun playing 3D Monster Maze and other classics on the original hardware, and reliving my teenage years by typing in examples from the excellent ZX81 manual. So much better than using an emulator.

Now I've got a working machine I feel more confident to overhaul another ZX81 I have which isn't in as good condition, so I'll composite mod that myself and get a replacement keyboard and see if that gives a better signal with the original ULA.
 
I bought a 7990. I'm going to pair it with an i7 860 and see how well an 11year old CPU and 10 year old GPU can handle modern games (this might be stretching the definition of retro so thin I can see through it :rolleyes:)

@Tee Hee Johnson they still come up fairly regularly on eBay but you need to be patient if you don't want to spend £50 plus on something like a Nvidia 6800. It also depends if you mean good as in "not a crappy MX card" for XP or good as in a late, Windows 7 capable card like an X1950 or 7800 or something which will be very expensive.
 
My new slot 1 board arrived but cannot get past "verifying DMI pool data".
Tried with different ram. No hdd/fdd. Tried different GPUs. No luck. Really stuck on this one
 
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