|
It almost looks like the switches are connected to those 3 pins? Maybe someone wanted to manually set them?
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 00:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
Nancy posted:I've worked on a grey split-tower X68k and on a scale of taking apart an OG Xbox versus a PS2 it's definitely more on the PS2 side of difficult to access boards and weird case fitment, so I'd tend to agree. Looks cool, feels ill-thought out. I opened it up to replace the PSU with a picopsu, and to install a ram expansion and it felt fairly easy to deal with. .. that said I’ve also installed ps2 modchips and found those not too bad either.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 09:27
|
|
|
Coffee Jones posted:Are you talking about this from an electrical engineering perspective? My three-year quest on an ACE has all kinds of complaints of this nature (7000-word draft entry, mostly bullet points.) I've repaired a bunch of vias, several traces, lots of through-holes, replaced the power supply and I'm still having the system crash into an unimplemented trap before it can even clear out video RAM. I think it might be something on the I/O board signalling a DMA transfer without actually having anything to transfer, but it's just a hunch. I think I will have to write a test ROM, which I don't quite have enough knowledge of the system to do yet. Mine has not only had battery corrosion but seems to have gotten some humidity damage. It got bad enough that I bought a PRO 1 that had been through a mudslide and filled with bugs and cigarette tar and it's working now, whereas the ACE is still essentially dead. Stuff like plated through-holes in the bottom board being a split rivet design instead of a full through-hole, meaning it's super easy to pull a pad (sometimes just heat does it) or incompletely fillet when desoldering and resoldering so you end up breaking a circuit by having a missing solder joint on the top. For whatever reason, battery leakage seems to often take out the RTC IC (which causes soft-power issues of its own) and travel across the board in a cloud. Stuff is wrecked in the immediate vicinity but also on the opposite corner of the I/O board. The towers are a big pain in the rear end to diagnose and disassembly/reassembly takes a long time. I've made a jig out of a sheet of plywood (and some longer ribbon cables) so I can probe the I/O board while the system is running. Mine also had a lot of stripped screw holes directly into the plastic and shrunken plastic damage here and there. I've completely removed the RF shields for the motherboard and for the expansion edge, as one of them was sagging enough to make intermittent contact with the motherboard, which hopefully didn't cause any faults up there before I got it. I bought a second ACE with the plan to depop its I/O board and build a clone board; that machine is in even worse shape than my first one. I ran completely out of motivation at this point, but I plan to get back to it at some point before the sun burns out. There's also no schematics for the ACE, so I've mostly worked off the later XVI schematics which have some overlap. Some Japanese users have also posted trace-outs for the vias that get most commonly damaged to both the IOSC control chip and the 68901 MFP:   It sucks, I wish someone had told me how much it would suck. Coffee Jones posted:Which leads me to think that the doujin output on the x68000 is much higher given its workstation nature but also reliant on the same sort of 5.25 floppies and sneakernet but also an ocean of undumped media. Brother's Takeru service made an enormous difference to the viability of the X68000. They are basically a proto-Steam, which allowed computer stores to stock small-batch and rare-platform games without having to waste shelf space on them if they didn't sell. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Feb 25, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 04:02
|
|
|
Buffis posted:I opened it up to replace the PSU with a picopsu, and to install a ram expansion and it felt fairly easy to deal with. Yeah it's not the worst teardown I've had to do, but the other JP PCs I've worked on are usually just one-step pop the top off. The unit I had was pretty crusty and needed cleaning + FDD work so it all had to come apart & the whole process convinced me to stick mostly to MSXs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 04:52
|
|
|
Seat Safety Switch posted:(ACE tragedy) Well this post definitely convinces me my own ACE with battery damage will never see life. I have a PRO that I think might work if I put in a Pico PSU. My PC-9821 was $20 and works like a loving champ.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 13:21
|
|
|
I had to design my own Pro (1) PicoPSU power supply board so I selfishly recommend you use mine if you can. Don't worry, I am gonna fix that ACE. I just got tired of being kicked in the balls for six months with no progress.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 17:12
|
|
|
Does anyone know of someone who can repair a Voodoo2? I noticed that a few pins on the TMU were touching so I attempted to spread them out with a sharp knife. As near as I can tel they are no longer touching but i'm still getting a TMU error when running mojo on the board. Windows 98SE picks it up no problem but when I try to run anything in glide (windows or dos) it crashes. Red Box is around the pins before I attempted to separate them. I don't think I pulled anything away from the board but I lack a soldering iron / heat station and anything else to magnify the work area. mojo results: 
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 17:56
|
|
|
Seat Safety Switch posted:I had to design my own Pro (1) PicoPSU power supply board so I selfishly recommend you use mine if you can. Oh yeah, I also designed my own Picopsu power supply board holder for the regular x68000. Works great    3D printers are cool
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2024 20:05
|
|
Seat Safety Switch posted:Brother's Takeru service made an enormous difference to the viability of the X68000. They are basically a proto-Steam, which allowed computer stores to stock small-batch and rare-platform games without having to waste shelf space on them if they didn't sell. Thanks for the write up! Re: Takeru from Brother Nintendo must have been inspired by this when they made the Famicom Disk System and built their own kiosks. https://minahito.wordpress.com/2016/08/04/soft-vendor-takeru-the-worlds-first-app-store/ It must have been wild being a PC otaku in the 80’s and being in a super densely populated area like Tokyo where it’s not hard to find hundreds of IRL enthusiasts and clubs. So if you’re - say - working on an image editor, you can prototype it to your buds and sell it via takeru. Make it successful enough and it’s a fine side-hustle.
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 12:12
|
|
|
Coffee Jones posted:It must have been wild being a PC otaku in the 80’s and being in a super densely populated area like Tokyo where it’s not hard to find hundreds of IRL enthusiasts and clubs. The tech and network was repurposed for the much more successful Joysound karaoke system, which suffered less from the low download speeds by distributing MIDI files.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 14:10
|
|
|
For MSX Takeru was mostly just budget releases of big titles or disk re-releases of old MSX1 games. Not sure if was different on other systems but most indies on MSX just self published and did mail order or local sales. It's a bit annoying on the current secondhand market cause people try and sell heavily-used Takeru disks close to full retail prices.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 17:00
|
|
|
Huh. The UK tried something vaguely similar with EDOS, but it also fell apart very quickly. Probably because no-one was clamouring for a digitally-distributed Edd The Duck.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 17:47
|
|
|
Seat Safety Switch posted:I had to design my own Pro (1) PicoPSU power supply board so I selfishly recommend you use mine if you can. Of course! Your site has been a valuable resource.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 18:36
|
|
|
Nancy posted:For MSX Takeru was mostly just budget releases of big titles or disk re-releases of old MSX1 games. Not sure if was different on other systems but most indies on MSX just self published and did mail order or local sales. One of the coolest parts about Takeru for the MSX is that, on at least one kind of station, you could write games to blank MSX flash carts. Someone opened one a few months ago, and it seems like they use a normally impossible combination of slot select signals to trigger "hey it's programming time."
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 19:23
|
|
|
Two Owls posted:Huh. The UK tried something vaguely similar with EDOS, but it also fell apart very quickly. Probably because no-one was clamouring for a digitally-distributed Edd The Duck. I had an EDOS copy of Boulderdash Construction Set that I bought from a shop in Norfolk that also sold horse tackle. It was pretty inexplicable but the game was fine.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 19:25
|
|
|
I got Mighty Bombjack for C64 from a John Menzies EDOS system. I was a bit annoyed that they only recorded it on one side of the tape as I was struggling with a dodgy Datasette at the time.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 12:53
|
|
|
Hoping someone here ran in to this - the CMOS battery is dead on my mobo, it's an "Odin OEC12C887A" It's this one https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/biostar-mb-8500tac-a-ver.-5 Fortunately per notes on that page, someone made a mondern replacement, but it comes in two "packages" * https://github.com/necroware/nwX287 "SO-24" (although this info is on the 2nd link. * https://github.com/necroware/nw12887 "this project was made for the SSOP-24 version of the RTC IC" For the life of me I cannot determine which of those two my original bios is and they sure look pretty similar. Anyone able to hit me with a clue bat?
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 13:37
|
|
|
falz posted:Hoping someone here ran in to this - the CMOS battery is dead on my mobo, it's an "Odin OEC12C887A" It's this one If your motherboard is like the one I dealt with on my Gateway, and the clock chip is soldered in, then if you heat up the area under the chip you can yank the plastic cover off and expose the IC with the model info printed on top. This would also expose the pin connections. Do you think that would help?
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 13:56
|
|
|
Tiny Timbs posted:If your motherboard is like the one I dealt with on my Gateway, and the clock chip is soldered in, then if you heat up the area under the chip you can yank the plastic cover off and expose the IC with the model info printed on top. This would also expose the pin connections. Do you think that would help? 
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 16:17
|
|
|
Smells like an off-brand Dallas to me.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 16:36
|
|
|
Anyone here near London /SE England who'd clean up an old Xbox 360 (mainly reglue the fans, maybe stick some custom ones if cheap?) for a gift of beer/ scotch or similar? I'm sure it's an easy job for a hobbyist but I will snap plastic bits off or worse and it's still very usable outside the current jet engine noise
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 17:54
|
|
|
falz posted:It's definitely soldered in, but I can see the exact name on the top. You think there may be more on the bottom? When googling that I can find zero spec sheets of what 'package' it is. Yeah that’s the same kind of cover I pulled off, only mine was blank. Still, it seems like pulling that off and checking the pin connections might help. Maybe desolder the whole thing first since you’re going to do that anyway (good luck, it was practically impossible to desolder mine without going at it from both sides and a lot of mechanical force).
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2024 18:09
|
|
|
Tiny Timbs posted:Yeah that’s the same kind of cover I pulled off, only mine was blank. Still, it seems like pulling that off and checking the pin connections might help. Maybe desolder the whole thing first since you’re going to do that anyway (good luck, it was practically impossible to desolder mine without going at it from both sides and a lot of mechanical force). I may yolo go to town on it with a dremmel per https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22000
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2024 14:04
|
|
|
falz posted:Hoping someone here ran in to this - the CMOS battery is dead on my mobo, it's an "Odin OEC12C887A" It's this one Your original RTC and BIOS ICs are in DIP format, the classic "big 80s computer chip." Both modules you've linked will replace this ODIN Dallas clone, but the difference is which new RTC chip the adapter board takes. The new chip is sold in 24-pin SOIC (SO-24) and 24-pin SSOP (SSOP-24) and each adapter board design only accepts one of the two. SOIC is much easier to solder by hand, though both are feasible. You'll notice that in the readme each adapter board has a different chip soldered to it. That's the new replacement RTC chip. These adapter boards basically just take a new RTC chip, slap a battery on it, and then adapt the pinout to the big DIP IC that the motherboard expects. SOIC:  SSOP:  It seems to me that the order of operations here, if you want to use one of these Dallas replacement boards is: 1. Desolder the ODIN Dallas RTC clone from the motherboard (this is going to suck if you don't have a vacuum desoldering gun, and probably suck even if you do; Dallas RTCs are infamously annoying to desolder because they soak up the heat and have huge pins.) 2. Order the board of your preference from JLCPCB or whatever 3. Order the components and assemble the board with new pin headers 4. Snip off the pins as described in the build readme 4. Drop the board into the motherboard (ideally this is into a socket) Chopping the top off and jumping the battery is a lot easier (and messier, but you've got a vacuum, I'm sure.) I should also mention that it's a lot safer to desolder the chip before you cut the top off of it, especially considering how close those slots are, but see the caveats for step one above. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Mar 2, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2024 06:00
|
|
|
Alright so I've kept working on this P90 Gateway 2000 motherboard. I replaced the Dallas clock, replaced the CPU with a Socket 5 P90, replaced the PSU with a modern one with an ATX->AT adapter, and the dang thing still won't boot. Everything gets power, the CPU heats up, the GPU heats up, the power LED is lit, and there's a whining noise, but that's it. Not even a beep out of the speaker. There's three big capacitors by the AT connector that seem fine. Should I try replacing them? My board has an extra one in that spot right next to the inductor: 
Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 7, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2024 18:28
|
|
|
Hey champs, I have done a thing. I finally bought myself one of these for my Atari 800: https://thebrewingacademy.com/products/atari-800-xl-xe-ultimate-sd-cart I already have a Lotharek SIO2SD as well as an SIO2PC, but neither of those solutions handle cartridge loading, and there are some games that just aren't available in disk or tape form, such as Parker Brothers Frogger and Gyruss. (note: you guys probably already figured this out, but every version of Gyruss for the Atari 800 that isn't the cart version is bootleg and broken) At this point, I'll be able to run basically anything for the Atari 8-bit set. Disks --> SIO2SD Tapes --> SIO2PC Carts --> Ultimate SD cart There's gonna be a vintage computer exhibition in my city this upcoming Sunday, and I've decided to splurge and get next-day shipping on the goods so they'll be ready for the show.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2024 00:06
|
|
|
Surely that means my cartridge version of Gyruss is worth a million dollars
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2024 00:21
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:Surely that means my cartridge version of Gyruss is worth a million dollars In my heart it is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2024 00:50
|
|
|
I use the SDrive Max on my 800XL for most stuff. I also have a good collection of 400/800 games that I got in a bundle with the hardware: First time I used the Touch Tablet since I brought the Atari about 6 years ago. Found a working copy of Atari Artist so I could give the tablet a run
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2024 10:20
|
|
|
Put that picture in the OP, please and thank you.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2024 14:18
|
|
|
Tiny Timbs posted:Alright so I've kept working on this P90 Gateway 2000 motherboard. I replaced the Dallas clock, replaced the CPU with a Socket 5 P90, replaced the PSU with a modern one with an ATX->AT adapter, and the dang thing still won't boot. Everything gets power, the CPU heats up, the GPU heats up, the power LED is lit, and there's a whining noise, but that's it. Not even a beep out of the speaker. What video card are you using and is it PCI?
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2024 01:19
|
|
|
LtDan posted:What video card are you using and is it PCI? Yeah it’s some ATI Mach32 PCI card. I tried a Voodoo 3 PCI card, too.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2024 01:41
|
|
|
You Am I posted:I use the SDrive Max on my 800XL for most stuff. I also have a good collection of 400/800 games that I got in a bundle with the hardware: Are those the Apple speakers from the G3/G4 era?
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2024 08:58
|
|
|
armpit_enjoyer posted:Are those the Apple speakers from the G3/G4 era? Yep, I have a PowerMac G4 MDD that those speakers can plug into, as they have a weird connector. I have tried chasing down the amp that you can connect those speakers to so it gives you a proper 3.5mm plug, but so far I have been unsuccessful. EDIT: Oh, there's an Aussie mob who have made a new amp for those speakers: https://juicycrumb.com/product/jc-hi-fi/ You Am I fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Mar 10, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2024 10:13
|
|
|
Tiny Timbs posted:Yeah it’s some ATI Mach32 PCI card. I tried a Voodoo 3 PCI card, too. I had issues using one of those "nos" ATI rage cards like this one Any chance you have a POST card to see if there's any diagnostic codes? I know you mentioned you're not getting any beeps though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2024 19:59
|
|
|
Oh wow - a video on Takeru software vending machine (see earlier in this thread) was just published https://youtu.be/E1_JBKNcw1M?feature=shared
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2024 02:57
|
|
|
Revision Demoparty 2024 was this easter weekend in Saarbrücken, Germany - and it seems they're better about putting video coverage online https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNqQO7lFY6dms3bvrmG6AqJ-wkfE5Tinr Since this is the retro computer thread - Here's "Oldskool Demo" - 8 and 16 bit systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad_qRmlFafA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad_qRmlFafA&t=647s - here's an NES demo. If I was blindfolded I don't think I could tell the difference between C64 SID music and NES music 80% of the time. Since Amiga is so popular as a demo platform - it is its own category https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhe5aZeIXSY 256 byte demo - vga graphics with DOSbox as the spec platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p5HCTUNgfU Oldskool 4K Intro - showing the scenes w4r3z roots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AX9yKOrdPA
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2024 17:12
|
|
|
Coffee Jones posted:256 byte demo - vga graphics with DOSbox as the spec platform
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2024 20:53
|
|
|
I totally love the demoscene, especially for the Atari ST and Commodore Plus/4
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2024 07:39
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
an actual frog posted:Wow. Remnants (at 9:15) is *very* impressive. That was insane. Like, how. This message with quote is 225 bytes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 12:29
|
|