What retro things have you done today?

I decided to look through some boxes of my retro PC stuff I've collected up over the years and I found socket 370 boards with ISA slots on them that I didn't even know I had but unfortunately the capacitor plague has got most of them apart from one 370 board that looks ok'ish with just two slightly bulging caps...

I also found a socket 462 board with its processor and AGP plus DDR RAM... This board looks very good, no bulging caps but I have no CPU Cooler for it or PSU. The PSU that I was going to use is dead and has leaky capacitors... god those capacitors :mad: lol.

I will need to look through some of my PSU's next... hopefully I have something...

So here is what I have found so far...

Retro beige case
3.5 Floppy drive
Optical Drive
Motherboard
Processor
AGP TNT GPU
A bag of PC screws & stand offs
A 64GB SSD

I am almost there... I just need a cooler and a PSU and some suitable capacity RAM. Something like 128MB will do. I will also need an IDE to SATA adapter. Oh and some thermal compound, can't forget the thermal compound.

Its quite funny looking on ebay at the DDR400 RAM... the lower capacities cost more than the high capacities.
 
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Fitted a pretty ludicrous cooler to my FX 5900 Ultra.

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I got all my retro computer stuff out yesterday evening, I'm definitely running short on power supplies... I've got too many retro PC's so I'm going to start selling some or parting them out mainly the smaller units and some of the towers. I prefer the horizontal type where you can sit a nice CRT on top and admire the beauty of the whole computer with all its disk drives. You can't really do this with clumsy towers unless they are beside the wall to stop them from accidentally being knocked off.

I don't know if anybody remembers the photo of the TINY PC I restored... well besides the missing drive bay cover... I still haven't found a drive bay cover for it and although this retro PC has been fantastic and has worked flawlessly without any issues since I rebuilt it, I'm not really a fan of the case and with the missing drive bay cover it does make it look a bit scrappy so I'm planing on transferring everything out of it to put into a much better looking retro horizontal case I have. I will then sell off the TINY PC case. This PC still has its original 4GB HDD in 100% working order. I think that the Pentium II board that I used in this machine might have an ISA slot if I can remember rightly and if so I'll be putting in an ISA sound Blaster 16 once its in its new case.

The floppy drive in the other case is actually grey not beige, apologies for the poor photos I will take some better ones later when I get more time.

The case with the owl on it will be the case I will be transferring the TINY PC too.
 
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I couldn't decide which one of these two case to build my experimental DOS PC into.

The first PC case photo already has a modern LGA775 board running Windows 7 which was a sleeper build I did back in 2014 but I might just downgrade the processor to a Celeron 420 and RAM down to 256MB and install MS-DOS Plus Windows 98 on a 32GB SSD. Sound Blasters and PCI TNT card or old ATi Radeon.

The second tower is empty with just two drives I installed yesterday. I was going to put the PC CHIPS 462 motherboard into this one but with no cooler I may have to pick another board. The CPU coolers for 462 boards are stupidly over priced like 20 pound or more so I'm not going to feed greed of rip off merchants its getting quite silly now.

I might have a CPU clip somewhere and I know I have some heatsinks somewhere too, maybe I could build a cooler for it, I also have plenty of spare fans.






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I finally found a 462 new old stock cooler for a fiver on ebay. I tell ya its getting ridiculous on ebay now when it comes to anything retro related.
 
through ongoing illness and generally being an adult getting in the way :p I haven't touched anything PC wise in ages.

Decided to fire up my Athlon XP box last night and play some Quake 3 and installed unreal tournament. got into UT's menu's and sound suddenly makes a loud static noise than then slowly fizzles out, reboot....no sound card detected, turns out that is the sound of an Audigy 2 ZS dying :(

So today's job was replacing it with a Xonar DG, adding some dust grills to the side panel of the Thermaltake Soprano whilst it was off and fitting a new BIOS battery to the NF7. Luckily I forgot i had the DG in the garage so quick swap over and then spent the rest of my lunch on Quake :D

Currently in process of building myself a better pc workbench setup in the garage so by proxy as part of the tidy up I have put aside a load of retro components I have squirreled away and just not going to make use of, as decided to focus more on my favourite project hardware. expect an exodus of kit on MM in the next few weeks lol
 
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I've been preparing a few retro PC towers for some more retro builds but nowt more I can do until I find or repair my old PSU's.

I've got all my spare old PSU's out on the work bench for inspection and testing with my new PSU tester. Nearly every one I have opened so far has bulging capacitors. I remember that all these PSU's all worked at one point but caps have gone bad over the past few years. I've only got one good PSU so far.

I've more to inspect and test.

Luckily PC power supplies are still reasonably priced its just the having to wait for it to arrive that I don't enjoy especially when things end up going other addresses and I have to keep knocking on doors to get my parcels. I will need quite a few bags of 2200mF caps and 1500mF as well.
 
Today I had the good fortune to dig through this mess in order to replace 3 pop bumpers that sheared the threads clean.
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Unfortunately didn't take photos of the disassembly of the play field. Mainly because it was so awkward I was just focusing on not losing screws and nuts, as they're all imperial and I didn't have spares. But this is the table in question.
 
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LewisRaz said:
The prices of everything are so inflated, not seen anything I would consider a deal for a while now
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Are you just browsing or looking for a particular piece?

I literally have everything I need. But, I like the look of that GUS replica Pi thing that PhilsComputingLab reviewed. And also the Orpheus sound card..

This year, I promised myself to set up a PC and finally install OS/2 Warp. And to be a bit quicker rotating my stock to play on, or heaven forbid, sell.
 
Nothings selling though, The Covid bubble burst.

To be fair, there's a bit of a difference to a high end AGP card and a janky generic beige case. I ain't bought nothing for ages now. Nothing that interests me. I've got the stuff to build a PicoGus, just need to order a PCB.
 
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