What retro things have you done today?

Retro6 said:
I found my flux and de-soldering braid but I think this board is defeating me which is very annoying. Caps came off easy but unclogging the holes is impossible, the solder just wont budge. I hate soldering motherboards. Anything else is easy I've been soldering for years. I feel like just chucking this motherboard.

Has anybody got any tips for unclogging holes on a motherboard?
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Will be a big ground plane, pre heat the board with a hair dryer or something similar. This has been the bane of all my soldering attempts.
 
LewisRaz said:
Will be a big ground plane, pre heat the board with a hair dryer or something similar. This has been the bane of all my soldering attempts.
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I'll give it a try but first I'll wait for my new braid to arrive and if that fails then I'm thinking about heating up a sewing needle and poking it in the hole which might work.
 
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I was just wondering if a motherboard only has one ISA slot, is there an expansion card I can get for it for more ISA slots? ...maybe I could make one if not...

I was thinking something along the lines of one of these...

gBRpMlp.jpeg


Then soldering two ISA slots "male to female" together to make a flexible ISA cable that can then plug into the existing ISA slot on the motherboard giving me a few more ISA slots lined up with the inside of the ATX case. I have enough room in the case to do something like this. Just an idea...
 
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Retro6 said:
I was just wondering if a motherboard only has one ISA slot, is there an expansion card I can get for it for more ISA slots? ...maybe I could make one if not...

I was thinking something along the lines of one of these...

gBRpMlp.jpeg


Then soldering two ISA slots "male to female" together to make a flexible ISA cable that can then plug into the existing ISA slot on the motherboard giving me a few more ISA slots lined up with the inside of the ATX case. I have enough room in the case to do something like this. Just an idea...
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Interesting thought.

What are your use cases? Sound and video card on the same motherboard? I take it that if there's only one ISA, there must be multiple PCI slots?
 
!bluetonic! said:
Interesting thought.

What are your use cases? Sound and video card on the same motherboard? I take it that if there's only one ISA, there must be multiple PCI slots?
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There are 3 PCI slots, I'd only need 3 ISA slots but even if two ISA slots would be better than one. One for a video card and one for sound blaster 16 and then the third for a ISA to USB card for file easy transfer, or I could maybe do an IDE to CF adapter in a slave configuration with the hard drive and transfer files to DOS that way then I'd only need two ISA slots.
 
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I'm testing out my DOS/WIN95 build although its far from ready its just at testing stages... So this build I wanted to see how it does with an 4GB industrial SSD but the PC failed to detect it. I know it works as I've tested it in my Windows 10 computer and formatted it, but its just not detected in the BIOS so I then started swapping IDE cables and trying again but it still wasn't detected so it could be an issue with the adapter... I decided to try an SD to IDE adapter with a 2GB SD card and that was detected no problem.

I then ran into strange problems with F-Disk that didn't make any sense. There was a partition on it but it would not delete the partition so I had to plug the SD Card into my other PC and re-format it in FAT16 and tried again just out of curiosity, fdisk still wouldn't delete the partition but anyway as I formatted the SD card I went into the MS-DOS 6.22 setup and began to install MS DOS without any issues. I don't plan on using this as my hard drive, its just for testing to see how things run. I will install WIN95 the old skool way from MS DOS as I'm curious to see what chipset drivers get installed in Windows 95 without hunting for drivers.

In regards to the IDE to SATA adapter, I will have to borrow another from my other retro build and test that in the DOS/WIN95 machine to see if the adapter is actually at fault and not something else causing the issue.
 
This one didn't work at all. I tested with another and it worked.

I installed Windows 95 and found the drivers for the motherboard... well almost its always a headache hunting for drivers because half of them never work. The chipset is by VIA failed to install graphics drivers, I installed the 4 in 1 chipset drivers which installed everything apart from sound and video then after that the computer will only start up in safe mode now. Time for a little break. I'll come back to it later.
 
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The IDE to SATA adapter that wasn't working I noticed that some of the solder joints looked iffy so I re-flowed all the joints and its now detected by the computer :)
 
Thanks I'll give that a try...

I've had a break through... I was starting to get multiple hard drive failures and I knew all these hard drives worked I even changed adapters around plus IDE cables... lastly I swapped out the RAM and the hard drive issues went away. It would also explain the weird issues I was getting in f-disk.

I only paid 7 quid for this board from ebay thinking it probably had issues but I took a risk on it, it being so cheap. Its got 64MB of RAM now which is still plenty for WIN95 and what I'm going to be using this PC for.

The industrial 4GB SSD now works on it too.
 
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Been wanting to build another 939 Athlon x2 system like i had years ago but never managed to find one of the boards I wanted. Had a DFI Lanparty RDX200 (ridiculous money!) at the time and the mack daddy of boards was the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. had pretty much given up finding one cheap and abandoned the idea.

By fluke on FB marketplace place on my route to work i found a retro pc case for £10....that peaked my interest in general so had a look, comes with a "free motherboard, CPU, RAM". Turns out after zooming in on the images that it is in fact a 3800x2, A8N-SLI Premium and what looks like gold GEIL RAM + A Zalman cooper flower cooler.

Pick it up in the morning on way to work :D

Have a massive cat vets bill coming, so thought that £10 to keep me occupied for a few months was a good deal :). Fingers crossed it works :D

Big question to the room, what's a good period correct SLI setup? I have a pair of GTX260 GS's. Are they too new to fit in or just peak performance for the time?
 
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One of the PCs I have that I built back in 2014 I was going to turn back into a retro build, its a sleeper PC that I built years ago in a retro case. I expect the clock battery is dead after all those years but the board and GPU inside are decent for an XP build and it would seem a shame to tear it all down to make a Windows 9x system out of it. The hardware is too new for Windows 9X but it might be perfect for Windows 2000 SP4... I'm not really a fan of XP and I'm in the mood for some experimentation, I'm pretty sure there are Windows 2000 drivers for the board and GPU. Windows 2000 is also faster than XP looks much more retro and cleaner. I could probably still play earlier 90s games as well as mid 2000s more modern games on it. I will pull that out the cupboard later.
 
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