What retro things have you done today?

had my electron out today as the power is dodgy, mainly because they never had a power switch so the naughty way to turn off when i was a nipper was to pull the jack out. I cant solder, so the PSU board is off to be repaired. and will be returned with an inline power switch and the Mega Games Rom cart after i have selected the games. My dad bought the plus 1 as he though my mum would do word processing and spreadsheets on it, but that never happened.

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Talking of 486's I'm going to revisit my "oddball" 486 in the next few weeks. I picked up a new card for it recently. Honestly, the only reason I picked up the card was because EISA cards are incredibly rare and it was very cheap.

The card in question is an Adaptec EISA AHA-2740AT SCSI Controller. The machine currently as an IDE Caching controller with 4mb ram but its nice to have the option to go down the SCSI route.

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Here is the machine. Its a 486 DX2 66mhz on a ASUS VL/EISA-486SV1 with 20mb ram and a VLB Cirrus Logic 2mb CL-GD5429 VGA Card

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Being a bit of an unusual configuration I'm going to recap this card and add it to the pc. Its a a MediaVision PAS 16 Pro card. I'm also going to look at getting some PCBs made to replace the Dallas RTC with a coin cell solution.

mWKiIjMh.jpg
 
had my electron out today as the power is dodgy, mainly because they never had a power switch so the naughty way to turn off when i was a nipper was to pull the jack out. I cant solder, so the PSU board is off to be repaired. and will be returned with an inline power switch and the Mega Games Rom cart after i have selected the games. My dad bought the plus 1 as he though my mum would do word processing and spreadsheets on it, but that never happened.
Starship Command was a flipping awesome game!
 
Just been playing around with DOSBox Staging after seeing some videos on PhilsComputerLab YT channel and I'm pretty impressed with it. I've installed it on my Dell Optiplex 5080 SSF pc and connected it to the 20" Dell via a DP to DVI Cable and activated a CRT shader and it looks really good! The sound aspects are great also. SF2 soundfont loading via Fluidsynth and it also supports MT32 with the correct roms. SB Family of cards supported along with Gravis UltraSound and the rare Adlib Gold. I loaded the 8mb Creative GM soundfont and it sounded great.

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more info on this crt shader please
 
Talking of 486's I'm going to revisit my "oddball" 486 in the next few weeks. I picked up a new card for it recently. Honestly, the only reason I picked up the card was because EISA cards are incredibly rare and it was very cheap.

The card in question is an Adaptec EISA AHA-2740AT SCSI Controller. The machine currently as an IDE Caching controller with 4mb ram but its nice to have the option to go down the SCSI route.

rM2820Hh.jpg

Here is the machine. Its a 486 DX2 66mhz on a ASUS VL/EISA-486SV1 with 20mb ram and a VLB Cirrus Logic 2mb CL-GD5429 VGA Card

vWGDruxh.jpg
qpiBdFOh.jpg
58rp5SNh.jpg

Being a bit of an unusual configuration I'm going to recap this card and add it to the pc. Its a a MediaVision PAS 16 Pro card. I'm also going to look at getting some PCBs made to replace the Dallas RTC with a coin cell solution.

mWKiIjMh.jpg
Its crying out for some retro case badges https://geekenspiel.com/collections
 
Not something I've 'done today' as such but thought I'd ask the question: does the Nintendo DS now count as retro gaming seeing as the eshop closed officially on Monday? I know I know it's far too new to be retro but I did pick up some of the old virtual console game boy games before it closed. I'll be replaying through Pokémon red and blue - glitches and all - over the next few weeks.
 
Managed to come across a board I've wanted for a good while, and one popped up on the bay this week, albeit listed as not working/ spares or repairs. The board has bulging/leaky caps but other than that looked in good nick. I decided to take the punt as I've not seen this board pop up in all my searches. The board in question is a Chaintech 7AIA0/100 Socket 462 KT133 M-ATX motherboard. It has 4x AGP and an ISA slot. Also I think the sound chip on board is the same one used on the MK8330. It is supposed to have SB16 comptibility.

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So the board showed up. Proceeded to set it up and thankfully the board powered on, but would not post. Flashed a BIOS on it but still no post. Ended up ordering 11 2200uf 6.3v Panasonic caps and 14 Nichicon 470uf 10v caps. Today I replaced the 11 2200uf caps and 3 1000uf caps I already had.

Removing Caps
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Main Power Stage Caps replaced
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I was fed up of soldering at this point so left the 14 470uf caps for now.

Decided to try it with the caps I had replaced, and result! The board posted. I'll proceed to replaced the remaining caps at some point the weekend.

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Picked up a genuinely museum condition Apple ][ Europlus today.

16KB model (according to the box) with CoEx 16KB expansion, Videx Videoterm, and Saturn Accelerator II.

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Further pictures for your interest.

 
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Picked up a genuinely museum condition Apple ][ Europlus today.

16KB model (according to the box) with CoEx 16KB expansion, Videx Videoterm, and Saturn Accelerator II.

D3AimyO.jpg

BBYTwE5.jpg

k5gt65q.jpg

rGqa2xJ.jpg

IeNDVla.jpg

qD0n7M9.jpg

Further pictures for your interest.

Swear I saw someone with one seatbelted in their car on facebook yesterday!
Very very nice find! Are you going to replace the PSU in it? Saw a video recently where you can replace all the internals with modern parts
 
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