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Let me know how that setup works for you, I've got an Amiga 500 that I might decide to waste some money on at some point. I'm curious, does the ACE2b give you access to ECS video modes or just the extra chipRAM?
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Aug 2, 2022 09:34
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chiefnewo posted:Let me know how that setup works for you, I've got an Amiga 500 that I might decide to waste some money on at some point. Is there a "good" PLCC puller I should shell out for, or are they all pretty much the same? Checking Amazon but nothing really stands out.
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Aug 5, 2022 22:26
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Minidust posted:Is there a "good" PLCC puller I should shell out for, or are they all pretty much the same? Checking Amazon but nothing really stands out. They are all equally bad (or good?) in the budget range. There are fancy Hakko ones that are sized to a specific dimension of PLCC socket, but they'll cost you.
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Aug 6, 2022 03:33
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Successfully recapped the logic board of my TI-99/4a. Just need to do the power board tomorrow. I'll be paying Parsec when I'm 80.
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Aug 6, 2022 05:34
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Seat Safety Switch posted:They are all equally bad (or good?) in the budget range. There are fancy Hakko ones that are sized to a specific dimension of PLCC socket, but they'll cost you.
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Aug 8, 2022 01:46
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Why oh why does the up direction on both joysticks stop working when the caps lock is on for the TI 99/4A? A handful of games will warn you and remind you to turn it off, but still...
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Aug 22, 2022 22:11
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Finally did some surgery on my Amiga 500 the other day! Much thanks to you kind thread goons for the tips. I shelled out for that Hakko PLCC extractor, so removing the Agnus was the easiest part of the whole operation. Scratched the hell out of Gary with my older, pedestrian chip puller, but it was all superficial so no real damage (eventually used a flathead screwdriver to get started, then let the puller take care of the rest). Popped in the ACE2b, closed things up, inserted the ACA500plus and it was SHOWTIME. Happy to say that my stock power supply is working fine so far, although I haven't done much in the way of overclocking yet. Will probably get one of those c64psu "boost" units if there ends up being a problem. chiefnewo posted:Let me know how that setup works for you, I've got an Amiga 500 that I might decide to waste some money on at some point. Worth nothing is that I am using a Retrotink, so that handles the scaling part... the scaled video is outputting to a modern Freesync 4K monitor and 2000's Dell CRT, which are both accepting the 50Hz signal without issue, but YMMV. The PAL image appears in normal 4:3 on the 4K monitor, while it is squished horizontally on the CRT (looking slightly too tall by default, even for PAL). But of course both of these can be adjusted easily with the scaler in the mix. Now it's on to WHDLoad, which is a bit daunting since I've never actually done much computing on my Amiga before. Apparently the ACA500plus (and the instance of Workbench it installs) takes care of some prerequisites. So I already had a built-in utillity for unpacking .lha files, along with a Devs\Kickstarts folder with 2 roms included. I used shell/command line to unpack the WHDLoad installer (which I first copied to Ram Disk... my first time actually using that icon in 30+ years!). Installed in C: directory, then installed a couple of .lha game packages. So far it seems like I can run games without issue, but I'm gonna spam a few questions:
Minidust fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Aug 23, 2022 |
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Aug 23, 2022 17:15
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1. Hard disk size is depended on which Kickstart version you are running. I usually prefer making a system drive and a separate games/demos drive 2. There are some front end apps for WHDLoad like iGame that will make things easier for you: https://github.com/MrZammler/iGame 3. Never heard of it, sorry 4. Directory Opus (DOPUS) is your friend with anything to do with file/folder manipulation on an Amiga, including dealing with .lha files
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Aug 24, 2022 09:12
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You Am I posted:1. Hard disk size is depended on which Kickstart version you are running. I usually prefer making a system drive and a separate games/demos drive Thanks, I got a version of DOPUS running now (the one that worked best for me ended up being an .adf with hard drive install support) and it's a game changer!! Not only file management but a built-in .lha extractor... really glad I'm not gonna have to rely on shell/CLI commands for all these installs. Couldn't get iGame to work, I followed a few guides for the library prerequisites and all that, but I think my processor is a limiting factor even though I'm swimming in RAM at this point (I've seen posts asking for help with processors that are "only" 68020, and looks like I've got a 68000). Seems like there's a bunch of launcher programs out there though, so I'll give some others a shot! And according to the ACA500plus support forum, I shouldn't need to do anything special to use the full capacity on my CF card... apparently AmigaOS 3.1 is just limited in its ability to display the correct amount of free space. Neat! So I feel like I've got carte blanche to go wild with these WHDLoad installs now! Already messed with a few and it's great, and this actually addresses what I feel is a common problem with a lot of .adf collections out there. It's almost like you're getting curated "definitive" versions of these games, rather than having to sort through dozens of cracks. In some cases there has even been quality-of-life stuff patched in, like 2-button controller support. At least this has been the case with the popular Download site I've been using for WH games. I've noticed a lot of tutorials out there feature people setting up their installs via an instance of WinUAE and then moving it over to a real Amiga. Is this just for convenience or perhaps ease of video capturing, or is it like a good practice for reducing wear and tear on the Amiga? I'm no engineer so I have no idea if "wear and tear" is even a thing to be conscious of here.
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Aug 30, 2022 19:01
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I've done WorkBench setups for my A1200 in WinUAE as I have most of the software and tools on my Windows PC, including Amiga Forever. It is a good way of testing out your setup before running it on the Amiga hardware
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Aug 31, 2022 11:24
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 Friendly reminder that any time you buy something locally (in this case a C64), ALWAYS ask if they have anything else they'd like to get rid of.
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Aug 31, 2022 17:30
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Flicker free fix for C64 Elite. https://twitter.com/markmoxon/status/1565367717145808897
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Sep 2, 2022 09:15
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TheMadMilkman posted:
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Sep 2, 2022 23:08
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i made the mistake of answering an ad for someone getting rid of his entire retro mac collection and now i have to step over computers every time i need to get something from the basement it's really hard to decide on which of them i should let go though, i want to keep the bonkers apple studio crt but it makes an awful whining noise   and i want to sell the lovely all-in-ones but their flybacks keep arcing and i'd feel guilty if it conks out after 5 minutes for the new owner 
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Sep 3, 2022 06:16
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r u ready to WALK posted:and i want to sell the lovely all-in-ones but their flybacks keep arcing and i'd feel guilty if it conks out after 5 minutes for the new owner If the cases aren't cracked, someone will buy them, even knowing that the monitors are going out. Those had particularly brittle plastic, from what I recall.
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Sep 3, 2022 06:31
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r u ready to WALK posted:i made the mistake of answering an ad for someone getting rid of his entire retro mac collection and now i have to step over computers every time i need to get something from the basement However my favourite of that design is the G3 Blue and White.
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Sep 3, 2022 10:16
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I love these designs. They wouldn't fly today because they are kind of tacky, but the futuristic sort-of-but-not-really art deco thing they are going for is right up my alley.
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Sep 3, 2022 12:38
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It’s #SepTandy, and I wanted to post a follow-up to my Apple //c post with some more unobtanium shenanigans.  A few years ago, I wanted to restore the first computer I had growing up, the Tandy 1000 SX. If you aren’t familiar, it was an IBM PC clone from Radio Shack, more specifically a better and more IBM compatible clone of the IBM PC Jr than the Jr itself. What does that mean? Essentially better graphics and better sound than other clones. If you want to play DOS games from that era, it’s the system to play it on. This sales video is probably what helped convince my parents to buy it. Unfortunately, leaving a machine like this in a hot attic for 20 years was not a great idea in hindsight. Almost nothing worked. The “hard card” (hard drive) was not spinning, so I lost all of my ZZT levels I made as a kid I never backed up. The floppy drives weren’t working either, so I couldn’t even boot up an OS. Another problem was the monitor was flaky, only showing a clear picture if I hit it just right.  The first thing I did was buy an XTIDE, which allowed me to at least externally install an OS and boot from it. But the Tandy wouldn’t do what it was best known for, 16 color CGA Tandy graphic modes. It would lock up every time I tried to play a Tandy game or even load Deskmate. Lot of time was spent on and off trying to troubleshoot this, looking at schematics, checking memory, changing dip switches. Nothing made sense.  However, the original power supply died on me, and since it’s proprietary and I’m not going to dare try and repair it, I ended up finding a similar model on eBay that still worked. The only disadvantage was a missing molex to power two floppy drives (by design). One thing I eventually did was replace the loud-rear end fan on the back of it with a Noctua, which made it eerily quiet. Seriously, I could barely tell it was on anymore.  The next purchase I made was an ISA card that is supposed to replace all of the RAM over the ISA bus, and as a bonus it lets you add UMB memory. I was thinking that if it’s a bad RAM module, then this should fix it. Turns out it did not.  Well if I only have one way to load software, maybe the XTIDE is the problem. I needed another way to run Tandy games without the card in the system. Next purchase was a Gotek floppy emulator… but the weird floppy cable was too short. And after crimping a new floppy cable for it, I still couldn’t get it to work! The official firmware was lacking, so I modded the Gotek to run FlashFloppy firmware, and after engaging with their Github, luckily someone with a similar Tandy gave me the answer. I needed a very specific jumper setting on the motherboard…  And without the XTIDE in the equation, it turns out TGA games worked fine on the Gotek! The Tandy itself was fine. 5.25” floppy jumper settings was an arcane knowledge I had lost over time, but I was able to get one of the floppy drives to work alongside the Gotek after moving around the jumpers (and using a Y cable to split the power between them).  Next step I should’ve tried in the first place was to update the XTIDE firmware. I never noticed, but it shipped with very old firmware. I needed to make an educated guess on which EEPROM it had installed, otherwise I was going to have to buy a chip burner. Thankfully I picked the right settings, and the Tandy games started working from compact flash!  Now that everything is working, I can start configuring the OS to use these ISA cards.  First one that was already in there was an I/O and RTC card. It has serial, which is useful for mice I actually have, and keeping the time would be helpful so it doesn’t keep asking me on every boot. The battery was long dead, but I ended up using one of the batteries I bought for replacing in dead NES/SNES save games.  My dad mentioned there was something special installed in the Tandy. He recalled that if you pressed some hotkeys, it would change the speed of the system. I too vaguely remembered this, and it turns out he bought some fantastic unobtanium to extend the life of the system back in the day. On the card is the original 8088 processor, and…  It’s uhhh, 286 processor?! And it’s true, you just need the software installed to do a software switchover between processors. It’s a 286 Express!  So I found the software online (and eventually the original floppy!), and switching speeds and cache settings worked beautifully. I started to rebuild what I had installed on it originally, plus then some. You may have also noticed I am using an HDMI screen…  I bought an RGBtoHDMI from TexElec to convert the odd CGA video to something more modern and useful. I guess I could use a CRT VGA monitor if I really wanted to, but right now I’m using a portable HDMI monitor. By the way, TexElec’s customer service is amazing. I had a minor issue with my particular unit and they were very helpful in making it right. I can’t recommend them enough, they’re good people. Last thing I tried was to add math coprocessors, both 8087 and 80287. The 80287 got way too hot for my comfort, so I ended up removing it. Either are kind of pointless unless I’m crunching numbers. As far as I can tell, most games don’t utilize it. UMB also wasn’t as useful to enable, but I did get that to work, too.  After setting up a nice menu system, I had all the DOS games and apps from my childhood, many pulled from the original floppies. There was much fun had with 16 colors and pseudo Sega Master System sound. Mission accomplished, it’s a #SepTandy miracle!
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Sep 4, 2022 00:00
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Awesome post! The Tandy 1000 series is an underrated gaming platform for sure
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Sep 5, 2022 16:45
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growing up, most of my computing was done through MSDOS (although the very first computer we had in our house was an atari 400 with tape drive). i wanted to talk a little about amiga computing because i spent the past week or so screwing around with workbench in order to get some software to work. for those who haven't heard of it, video toaster was a hardware/software package for broadcasting. its most prominent use was from 1994 until roughly the mid-oughts. had two NTSC inputs, one output, onboard genlock, the works, all contained in one commercially-available computer system. it was manufactured by newtek, who released the amiga software as open-source back in 2004. problem is, nobody could get it working in emulation because it relied on calls to the hardware that it never got, causing it to crash. nobody working on development for UAE was working on anything close to VT card emulation, and it seemed to me like there wasn't a lot of interest in it. recently (like 2017 recently), somebody looked through the source code and found a "toasterless" flag. they compiled it with that flag turned on and sure enough, the software works without the hardware. its usefulness as a switcher is...well, that poo poo doesn't work. but the rest of the programs in with it (character generator, paint program, 3d modeler, and whatever chromaFX does that could be summed up in fewer words than i can think of at the moment) still have a lot of functionality.  somehow i've stumbled out of the intersection between regular dumbass and alternative dumbass and got the whole thing working. i think i have made a package with less bells and whistles to set up for those who'd like to screw around and/or make some analogue horror type poo poo with it-- would there be any interest if i were to share the hardfiles i built to get there? i mean, i know the kickstarter roms are still commercially available so i wouldn't include them with it, but as a broadcasting tech dipshit i figured there might be one or two goons who could get a kick out of it as well. Gene Hackman Fan fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Sep 5, 2022 |
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Sep 5, 2022 18:25
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I'd have no idea what to do but I'd definitely be curious to try it out
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Sep 5, 2022 18:41
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LtDan posted:I'd have no idea what to do but I'd definitely be curious to try it out you're in good company, but here's a dropbox.
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Sep 5, 2022 20:07
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Gene Hackman Fan posted:growing up, most of my computing was done through MSDOS (although the very first computer we had in our house was an atari 400 with tape drive). i wanted to talk a little about amiga computing because i spent the past week or so screwing around with workbench in order to get some software to work. I will never run this but it’s very cool. You should tweet or whatever it to Cathode Ray Dude
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Sep 5, 2022 20:24
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I think Babylon 5 finally got a decent quality release somewhere (although I'm holding the DVDs close until I see for myself), but I'm certain there are some other 80s/90s restoration projects that could really use this for stuff originally done on Amiga.
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Sep 5, 2022 22:06
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it is supposed to work with 24-bit images, but i haven't tried to convert a PNG24 to an IFF file yet. same with postscript fonts.After The War posted:I think Babylon 5 finally got a decent quality release somewhere (although I'm holding the DVDs close until I see for myself), but I'm certain there are some other 80s/90s restoration projects that could really use this for stuff originally done on Amiga. ...are there that many fans of seaquest dsv? Gene Hackman Fan fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Sep 5, 2022 |
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Sep 5, 2022 22:55
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I recently revisited Alone in the Dark on DOS. I grew up with it on floppy and always felt it was a bit spooky, especially when graphics were bad everywhere and I had a child's imagination. But even nowadays, it has some fun uses of sound, camera angle and abstract polygons that still makes me smile. Here is a little 10-minute runthrough of it, I drew a map as I went. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPIUleTn62c It isn't complicated like Resident Evil (you don't need to do much backtracking through the house) and there are tons of instant-kill traps that aren't telegraphed, but you can see some seeds that later pop up in games like RE.  AITD2 I remember being a lot more of a grind, still debating about trying that one again.
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Sep 6, 2022 21:39
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Electromax posted:I recently revisited Alone in the Dark on DOS. I grew up with it on floppy and always felt it was a bit spooky, especially when graphics were bad everywhere and I had a child's imagination. But even nowadays, it has some fun uses of sound, camera angle and abstract polygons that still makes me smile. This was one of the first games we had when we moved from Amiga to PC in 1993. When I played it we didn't even have a sound card yet so I played it with the PC speaker. It had digitized sound even with that. Cool game.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:43
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You should share your explorations in the "What Retro Game Are You Playing" Thread, we could use some more PC Action in there.
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Sep 7, 2022 06:49
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anyone using WHDLoad launcher programs for Amiga? I've been trying the popular ones out. Hitting a few snags but with some more research I think I'll settle on a daily driver soon:
Minidust fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 20:43
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A coworker mentioned that they had an old PC in their garage and I offered to take it off their hands, so now i finally have my own beige box! An IBM Aptiva 2168-M53, with a few upgrades from when it was actually in use. Unfortunately, at least one of the hard drives has the click of death, so I'll have to pull it out, but I have an IDE to SD card adapter that I was going to install while I wait for my CF to IDE adapter to ship (I pulled the sd adapter out of another, less old system I use in my workshop). This is my first time messing around with a computer from when I was too young to really know what was going on, so I have a few questions: Is 1998/9 old enough that it avoids the plague of bad capacitors that killed the PCs I had in the early 2000s? Everything looked fine when I opened things up, but if it's at risk for having one blow, I might see about recapping it. I don't have any floppy discs on hand, I assume I can use some software like rufus to make a bootable drive on my SD card, and have the PC boot to that? And is it possible to install Windows 98 SE over DOS? Ideally I'd like to be able to run both 98 and 3.1, and not having to use multiple partitions would be great.
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Sep 25, 2022 14:15
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A Real Happy Camper posted:I don't have any floppy discs on hand, I assume I can use some software like rufus to make a bootable drive on my SD card, and have the PC boot to that? Be careful, Windows 98 prefers to use FAT32, which DOS 6 and older won't work with. I'm not sure if the DOS version under Windows 98 SE supports running Windows 3.1. (Maybe I should test that some time.) Unless you're in it for the Windows 3.1 GUI specifically, there's very rarely any reason to not use Windows 98 when the software supports it. You can still boot it into a pure DOS environment for any games that really dislike Windows' VMM, and basically any Windows 3.1 application/game will run on 95/98/Me too. Check if the BIOS supports booting from CD, the Windows 98 CD's are definitely bootable. You shouldn't need floppies to install it.
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Sep 25, 2022 16:01
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Also there is a boot loader called plop that you can install on a floppy, boot from the floppy and instruct it to boot from the CD, even if the bios doesn’t support it. Very slick. https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
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Sep 25, 2022 16:10
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I'm having a really weird issue trying to get this thing to boot properly. I replaced the CMOS battery, since it was unsurprisingly dead, but now it takes forever to POST, and seems to have 2-5 seconds of lag on each keystroke, and the speaker screams at me if I even think about touching the keyboard outside of the times it wants to take input. I ended up yanking most of the RAM so that the memory check wouldn't take ages (it literally was taking about 30 minutes to check the 16MB that was in there when I got it) There isn't some kind of weird jumper on the motherboard that can cause it to throttle itself to 8086 speeds, is there?
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Sep 26, 2022 20:19
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If you haven't, try doing the CMOS clear operation by putting the appropriate jumper into the "clear" position, waiting 10 seconds, then resetting the jumper to original position. Sometimes that's required after replacing the battery.
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Sep 26, 2022 22:01
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Turns out I read the directions for an older revision motherboard, which has a different jumper location  Now it gets through POST just fine, but I get to fight the SD card compatibility demons.
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Sep 28, 2022 19:31
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A Real Happy Camper posted:A coworker mentioned that they had an old PC in their garage and I offered to take it off their hands, so now i finally have my own beige box! It's hideous/gorgeous!
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Oct 8, 2022 08:41
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I just noticed that the pin that goes from the power input on my old AT motherboard had somehow gotten loose from the ATX part of the adapter. The wire that got loose is the opposite end of the one I'm pointing the pen at. Where do I plug it in on the other end? 
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Oct 12, 2022 14:44
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just cram it back into any hole that is supposed to be a ground (common) pin you could try to bend out the little metal retainers a bit more on the pin so that it doesn't just fall out again 
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Oct 12, 2022 14:50
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purchased an Optiplex GX1 at the MIT Swapfest today. P3 500mhz, 512MB of RAM. it's one of the vertical mid-tower models with the case that comes apart in sections, making it probably the single best candidate for an upgradable desktop 98SE build I've come across in a while. everything works great except it didn't come with a hard drive which is pretty typical, so I ordered a CF-IDE adapter to install into the front panel. let's gooooooo
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Oct 16, 2022 19:16
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Oh man, I wish I still had my P3 733Mhz. So much Q3 and UT99 was played on that.
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Oct 17, 2022 06:18
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