What retro things have you done today?
- Thread starter Duke
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Its a 486 era laptop tho! Not sure if that makes it better or worse for tolerances
Caporegime
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Overnight parts from Japan:
Caporegime
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Yea the condition looks great, no sign of wear on the midi ports either, just waiting for a 9v center negative psu to turn up.
Also got some Roland MA-20 micro monitors turning up, should look fab with the setup.
Also got some Roland MA-20 micro monitors turning up, should look fab with the setup.
I'd imagine that would make it more tolerant of voltage fluctuation, as component costs with lower tolerance bands would have been prohibitively expensive!Its a 486 era laptop tho! Not sure if that makes it better or worse for tolerances
Very nice. A heads up that the Ma-8 pair on there atm have a fairly high bid on them
@paradigm I just thought screw it and did it:
This piece of crap only works and so does the HDD. all 122mb of it. it boots into some mad networking software and crashes before it can load to a prompt. Boots from floppy tho.
it has 4mb of ram. Dont know the cpu yet but im going to guess 486 33mhz from its name...
The screen is the worst thing I have ever seen. And it appears the ribbon is loose as there are some bands that go funny if you touch it.
Im going to strip it to barebones and bath the plastics in soap and the electronics in IPA. Pointless but interesting and cheap little timewaste
Very nice. A heads up that the Ma-8 pair on there atm have a fairly high bid on them
@paradigm I just thought screw it and did it:
There you go! Much win!
Time for a nice strip-down, a clean and maybe a cheeky upgrade or two?
You want that nice Ad-Lib parallel port soundcard that 8-bit guy did a video on! https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-adlib-opl2lpt
Well that killed a few hours and was actually pretty fun to do.
SX25 486 and 4mb of ram...
I cleared the crap out of the autoexec so I could take a look at the windows install. Wonder if there is any interest in my archiving this AST branded windows install? Mucho effort tho... Im fixing to just clear it and put dos 6.22 on.
The screen still has issues but everything is clean now. Its amazing it still stays together the amount of plastic that fell out of it.
A few pics of course:
SX25 486 and 4mb of ram...
I cleared the crap out of the autoexec so I could take a look at the windows install. Wonder if there is any interest in my archiving this AST branded windows install? Mucho effort tho... Im fixing to just clear it and put dos 6.22 on.
The screen still has issues but everything is clean now. Its amazing it still stays together the amount of plastic that fell out of it.
A few pics of course:
Took a break from retro stuff for a few days, plus it's too easy to keep browsing eBay for old hardware! Bad habit
@LewisRaz Looks like it cleaned up well, shame about the two missing keys. Are the screen viewing angles as bad as it looks in the photo? Don't think my eyes could handle that...
@cee-S-dee Good deal on the adapter then! You going to stick with the Celeron or try a P3 at some point? Not sure if performance will differ much though.
@paradigm Nice clean build in that case, that's the one thing I prefer over Micro-ATX - more space to route and hide cables! If the graphics card is overkill, maybe a GF4 TI or 9700/9800 Pro instead?
@LewisRaz Looks like it cleaned up well, shame about the two missing keys. Are the screen viewing angles as bad as it looks in the photo? Don't think my eyes could handle that...
@cee-S-dee Good deal on the adapter then! You going to stick with the Celeron or try a P3 at some point? Not sure if performance will differ much though.
@paradigm Nice clean build in that case, that's the one thing I prefer over Micro-ATX - more space to route and hide cables! If the graphics card is overkill, maybe a GF4 TI or 9700/9800 Pro instead?
I had intended to use my GF4 Ti4200, but it appears to have failed memory (light chequerboarding even in 2D). I’ve got a 9800XXL (9800XT OEM), and a 9800XT that could go in it I guess!
Or I could swap out the Quadro FX1000 (GeForce FX5800 equivalent) that is currently in the P4 Shuttle.
Caporegime
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Super socket 7 motherboard is alive and kicking, looked DOA at first but a pin was bent in the ATX connector.
Nice one. As much as I think my SS7 build is kinda pointless compared to a P3 build, its still one of my favourite machines!
Caporegime
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Yea kinda see that, hopefully with the 3dfx pairing, making it the only 3dfx machine i have it will see some good use.
Caporegime
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Need to build myself a combined midi and audio matrix.
Need 3x midi in, 3x midi out and audio in / out mix for each 3 machines and 3 midi channels.
End goal is to have upto 3 machine input with a Roland, Yamaha and Korg midi device which can be used from any of the three machines.
Need 3x midi in, 3x midi out and audio in / out mix for each 3 machines and 3 midi channels.
End goal is to have upto 3 machine input with a Roland, Yamaha and Korg midi device which can be used from any of the three machines.
Caporegime
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Yea, it is the inspiration behind this, though i aim to simplify by having all my switching in one 3d printed box.
IIRC MIDI only uses 2 pins of the 5-pin din (2 pins are not connected, and one is connected the shield/ring/ground). So a pair of 2-pole 4-position rotary switches could be used to switch between inputs 1-4 and outputs 1-4 (I know you only have 3 inputs and 3 outputs, but 3-position rotary switches are rarer).
Essentially giving you an old school KVM style switcher for MIDI.
Caporegime
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Yep, only worry about that is if a device uses the other pins, but probably not an issue in truth.