Adventures with old PC hardware & software

[xdaniel]

It's been a bit longer than I wanted, but here's some photos of the insides and outsides of the C128DCR:

 

Once again, the machine from the outside:

 

 

Overview of the insides:

 

 

Close-up on PSU (missed some spider webs in there, apparently):

 

 

Some of the chips, including the three CPUs it has - a 8502 for C128 and C64 mode, a Z80 for CP/M mode, and a 6502 for the 1571-type floppy drive:

 

 

Mainboard markings, including (I'm assuming) its serial number on the sticker and its date code (8725, thus 1987, week 25)

 

 

More chips and some of the external ports:

 

 

Close-up on the floppy drive, not at all protected against dirt, etc. other than by the machine's case itself:

 

 

Right-hand side ports and switches, from left to right: casette port, keyboard connector, joystick/mouse ports 1 and 2, floppy drive reset and system reset:

 

 

The machine's back side, with again from left to right: expansion port (cartridges, certain interfaces, etc.), Commodore serial port (floppy drives, printers, etc.), composite AV output, RF output, RGB output for 80-column display mode, userport:

 

 

And finally, the Commodore 128D label with serial number:

 

 

[xdaniel]

It's kinda fun to unbox still sealed software from 15 years ago! ...although the video quality is pretty crap, as per usual.

 

[!Tommy]

It's kinda fun to unbox still sealed software from 15 years ago! ...although the video quality is pretty crap, as per usual.

 

I run Windows 2000 as my main operating system. Never have any issues with it at all using the Kernel and Core extensions by Blackwingcat. Thanks for sharing this! Windows Me was indeed released after Windows 2000 so your choices were either 2000 or 98. Updating the service packs did make more games compatible with Windows 2000 as the Gold release and possibly SP1/2 ran a bit more like Windows NT 4.0 where it was basically business oriented and not for other home uses. And thanks to the unofficial updates, it's still possible to run programs designed for Net Framework 4 so I can still run SharpOcarina and whatever the other tool was called, I can't remember offhand. So either way, nice video and at least it grabbed my attention.

[xdaniel]

It's interesting to hear that there's still inofficial updates being made for Windows 2000, although I probably shouldn't be surprised considering other things like KernelEx for Windows 98

 

I ended up installing this copy of Windows 2000 in VirtualBox by the way, just for the hell of it, and I might just try to update it as far as I can for the same reason... Not sure if I'll get to that today, but I will report back with my results later.

[!Tommy]

It's interesting to hear that there's still inofficial updates being made for Windows 2000, although I probably shouldn't be surprised considering other things like KernelEx for Windows 98

 

I ended up installing this copy of Windows 2000 in VirtualBox by the way, just for the hell of it, and I might just try to update it as far as I can for the same reason... Not sure if I'll get to that today, but I will report back with my results later.

Hehe, I still use Windows 98 too because of KernelEx! It's not my main machine but my bedroom machine is running it and it's one of the least pain in the butt OSs I've dealt with in a long time. As long as you treat it good, it will be good to you in return! I bet you and I could swap stories on old computer experiences. That's my main passion now anyway. I'd even work with some very old Pentium or even pre-Pentium machines if I got my hands on them.

[xdaniel]

Thread revival time, got some finds from mom's attic to report! Sadly, it's not the upgraded Amiga 500 I had mentioned in this thread before, but it's the next best thing: it's a lot of our essential Commodore 64 hardware!

• Commodore 64 power supply
• Commodore 1541-II disk drive w/ power supply
• Commodore 1541 disk drive (missing the nameplate, I also seem to recall this one being broken?)
• Datamark tape drive for C64
• 3x serial cable (for the disk drives)
• Action Replay v5.0 Professional cartridge
• International Soccer cartridge (not essential, but hey, it was in the same box )

...add to that the C64 system itself, which I already had here at my place, a Final Cartridge III utility cartridge, which was in mom's basement, and the Competition Pro joysticks from that flea market a year or so ago, and it's a pretty nice set of gear! That said, tho, all of the stuff is in kinda rough shape - it's mostly just dirt and discoloration from age, thus requiring some TLC at best or Retr0bright or similar treatment at worst, but there's also dents and other minor to more noticeable damage. Some parts of our old setup are still MIA, too, such as the 1351 mouse and the composite AV cable... not even counting things that are rather useless nowadays, like the old MPS-803 printer, which probably doesn't even exist anymore. There's also another 1541 drive still at mom's place, but these things alone are pretty heavy, let alone carrying two of them plus all the other stuff, so that's something for another visit.

 

So, does all this stuff even work? Why, yes, at least the C64 and 1541-II do! Both of them fired up right away, I remembered how to hook up the drive to the system - serial devices are daisy-chained together, with everything but the system having two serial ports for that purpose -, even the rather bent floppy disk that was still left in the drive could be read (partially)! I also checked the Final Cartridge III and Action Replay cartridges, which also booted up first try, tho I can't use the former as it has a mouse-based GUI. Maybe that cartridge could also be used with a joystick, but I'm not sure where I put those Competition Pro.

 

Not sure what exactly I'll do with all of this, tho... I mean, I'm not going to trash or sell it, this thing was part of my childhood after all. I'm just wondering if I should ex. invest into getting a replacement case for the C64 system - the somewhat mangled case I have right now is one I found in the trash some 20 years ago, from a later model C64-C, because I thought the design looked better than the original "bread box" case. There's also several disk drive emulators that might be worth looking into, as SD memory cards and the like are certainly more practical these days than trying to find new and/or at least working 5 1/4" disks...

 

Also a quick note about two more things I found while cleaning up the attic, but which I haven't yet brought here for lack of transportation. I remembered having had these at one point or another, a long time ago, but didn't expect these to still be around: an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX and an IBM VGA CRT monitor! From what I can gather on the internet, this system is a 386SX machine based on IBM's microchannel architecture (like most PS/2s were), with between 1 and 8 MB of RAM on-board (4 MB was standard, apparently?), an ESDI hard disk (around 40 to 60 MB?), and a 3 1/2" 1.44 MB FDD. I really need to get these over here as well, so that I can check whether the system and/or monitor still work, or if they're something for the trash. I'm not particularly attached to either, so at least the CRT's fate really depends on the condition.

 

Anyway, I'll see about getting some photos of the Commodore gear up soon, once I cleaned up the system and drives some more

 

[!Tommy]

I actually had a Commadore 64 that I picked up at a garage sale for $5 but unfortunately it was very useless to me because it didn't have anything with it and at the time I didn't know as much about computers as I do now so I ended up just giving it away. But this sounds like quite an amazing find and the fact you have other things to pair along with it, maybe you could have some fun with it!

[xdaniel]

So, this place is pretty dead. However, I feel like writing about a machine I've spent a lot of time with over the last week or so, and Twitter isn't exactly the place for walls of text. And no, I don't want the character limit removed there.

Anyway, the machine in question is an Apple PowerBook 3400c, a 1997/1998 vintage PowerPC-based Macintosh laptop. This particular specimen is one I got at a flea market some seven or so years ago, and for quite cheap at that - I think it was 10€, maybe? It was much less than I would've expected, at least. I got it, messed around with it a bit, with Mac OS 9, with networking it to my PC back then, and then promptly lost interest again. In part because I didn't really have much software for it, and in part because OS 9 just wasn't very enjoyable and ran rather sluggish on this system.

Fast forward to late December 2015. I am not sure what exactly came over me, but I felt like just doing something with my couple of Macs, the iMac G3 and the PowerBook in particular. So, about a week ago, I fished the PowerBook out of storage and looked at what I had:

• Apple PowerBook 3400c
• 200 MHz PowerPC 603ev
• 32 MB RAM (16 MB on-board + 16 MB expansion)
• 20 GB Toshiba HDD
• 20x CD-ROM drive
• 12.1" LCD (800x600, 32k colors)
• Mac OS 9.0.4 (International English)

Plus various issues, none of which I have fixed yet, such as wobbly hinges (kinda like they aren't properly screwed down in the bottom half of the case) and a dead PRAM battery (think CMOS on PCs, i.e. for date/time and other settings), as well as the usual scratches, dead or stuck pixels and the like.

To start out, I backed up the few files I wanted to back up, before getting ready to format the HDD. Now, the only real link to the outside world that the PowerBook has on its own is the standard RJ45 ethernet connector, but without extra software, Mac OS isn't capable of ex. accessing Windows' shared folders, nor is the opposite true. So what was my lazy man's solution? Hack together a file upload script in PHP, start XAMPP (meaning, Apache and PHP) on my PC, and use the Mac's Internet Explorer 5 to "upload" the files one by one to the PC! That worked fairly well, although had I wanted to save more than just these couple of files, I probably would've rather got some sort of FTP client for the Mac and used my PC as an FTP server...

Well, files are backed up, so I started collecting software for the system from the internet - including a bunch of stuff that's technically pirated, but I can't really see anyone care about me downloading ex. an ISO of the 15+ years old, unsupported Mac OS 8.5 for my also 15+ years old and equally unsupported PowerBook. Once I had the basics, such as OS 8.5 in German, I went ahead and booted the system from the OS CD, formatted the HDD and installed OS 8.5. Another hour or so later, I had the OS running, installed the update to OS 8.6, as well as some additional software to allow the Mac to access the aforementioned Windows shares. Then came more software, general tools, some things I wanted to try out, etc.

And here comes the point where this old machine genuinely impressed me - for the first time, that is. I got SoundJam MP, a media player that was later purchased by Apple and apparently served as the base for iTunes. I had seen someone on Twitter (fail0verflow's marcan, I think) use this program on a 20th Anniversary Macintosh, which was a 1997 limited edition system roughly comparable to my PowerBook in terms of specs but ex. with a 50 MHz faster CPU, to stream AnimeNFO Radio over the internet, and I wanted to try that, too.

Imagine that! Streaming 192kbps MP3 from the internet, over a 10 MBit ethernet connection, to an ancient 200 MHz laptop! Such a dumb idea!

And it worked. It worked almost flawlessly. The sound occasionally cuts out for half a second, but that doesn't happen very often and is something I'll just ascribe to Classic Mac OS' kinda crappy, cooperative multitasking. Not sure if that's actually the reason, but it certainly seems that way to me. I also tried the same with 320kbps MP3 files stored on my PC and accessed via the local network, and this worked just as well. Maybe I'm exaggerating this achievement, maybe a 200 MHz Windows PC would be just as capable of playing back streamed MP3s at these bitrates, but these days it seems like to me that, say, anything below 1 GHz isn't capable of doing anything media-related anymore.

Anyway, after that I went looking for more software, especially games, although I actually haven't yet tried out very many of them. I found a lot - in fact, much of the software I'm using, freeware and otherwise, came from the same place (tho I'm not sure if I should name or link to it here) - but so far only played two, both ports from other systems: Warcraft II and Puyo Puyo 2. Both of them work quite well on this laptop, although they would both benefit from better input devices than what I have. The keyboard configuration Puyo Puyo 2 uses is awkward if you're used to either an SNES controller or reconfigurable emulator keymaps, and a working mouse would be nice for Warcraft instead of having to use the touchpad.

As for the second time the system impressed me, it was when I unplugged the power supply to see how much juice the battery has left. I started SoundJam MP and the AnimeNFO Radio stream and just let it run, periodically glancing over at the screen to check what Mac OS reported regarding the battery. Slowly but surely the battery indicators dropped; the bars showing the charge level and the timer showing the approximate remaining runtime...

And, well, slowly is the keyword here. I ended up plugging the power back in when the system reported one minute of charge left, which happened 73 minutes after starting playback. On a stock Apple battery, presumably also from 1997, or maybe a few years younger. But even if the battery is from, say, 2000, this machine still lasts a whole lot longer than my current, temporary PC laptop does (Dell Latitude C640 from 2003 or thereabouts; less than 10 minutes) and than my sadly broken 2009 laptop did (Asus X5DAB-SX070V; battery dead by mid-/late 2014). And this was while doing the whole streaming radio spiel. This was the point where this ancient laptop impressed me more than it should've had any right to.

Now, what am I going to do with the PowerBook going forward? I'll keep it, that's for sure. I found an Orinoco 16-bit PCMCIA wireless LAN card for rather cheap on eBay, which should work in this machine and other, older ones I have (ex. IBM ThinkPad 380ED) or might come across, so I'll certainly try to one-up the streaming radio stuff by making it all wireless. I also want to fix some of the issues it has, such as the dead PRAM battery (found some advice online on how to use replacement CMOS battery packs for PC laptops in this one) and I want to check what exactly is causing these irritatingly floppy hinges (which has to wait until I got the proper Torx screwdrivers or bits). Another interesting thing would be trying to rebuild the original system battery, despite it still holding out for over an hour. This is a low-priority thing at best tho, exactly because the battery still lasts as long as it does.

Well, I guess that's about it for the 3400c and for the moment!

[xdaniel]

...

 

Also a quick note about two more things I found while cleaning up the attic, but which I haven't yet brought here for lack of transportation. I remembered having had these at one point or another, a long time ago, but didn't expect these to still be around: an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX and an IBM VGA CRT monitor! From what I can gather on the internet, this system is a 386SX machine based on IBM's microchannel architecture (like most PS/2s were), with between 1 and 8 MB of RAM on-board (4 MB was standard, apparently?), an ESDI hard disk (around 40 to 60 MB?), and a 3 1/2" 1.44 MB FDD. I really need to get these over here as well, so that I can check whether the system and/or monitor still work, or if they're something for the trash. I'm not particularly attached to either, so at least the CRT's fate really depends on the condition.

 

...

Well, something's whirred back to life for the first time in ages yesterday...

 

 

Alright, so what exactly do we have here? It's an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX, from the looks of it in its stock configuration, or very close to it. The exact specs -- as far as I can tell anyway, more on that later -- are as follows:

• 16 MHz Intel 80386SX
• No FPU (does have a socket for one)
• 4 MB RAM (2x 2 MB)
• 60 MB ESDI hard disk
• 1.44 MB floppy drive
• Micro Channel architecture
• VGA, serial, parallel & PS/2 ports on-board

It turns on, counts the memory (up to 3968 KB, because 128 KB video RAM, I assume?) and... gets stuck with errors 161 and 163. "Well, no big deal! Let's just reset the BIOS settings to their defaults and see what we get!" ... is probably what I would say, if I wasn't already at least slightly familiar with these machines. Errors 161 and 163 respectively mean "CMOS configuration lost" and "CMOS error, clock not updating", which indicates that the on-board Dallas clock chip, which can be seen on the last photo above with the cable tie around it, has failed. The big problem with these is that these Dallas chips don't just contain the circuitry for the clock, but also its crystal and, worst of all, the battery -- i.e. unlike most, if not all modern PCs out there, you can't fix CMOS issues by just replacing a small coin cell battery on the board. And this battery is what usually fails with these chips.

 

Now, what's even worse with these PS/2s is that they won't boot when faced with errors 161 and 163. In that case, you can only boot it off of its Reference Disk, which is basically the BIOS setup and diagnostics in one. So I looked online for an image of the disk, which was much less painful than I had imagined, wrote that to a floppy disk using my ThinkPad 380ED, then put the disk into the PS/2 on boot, and... the drive started spinning, reading the disk, and eventually I was greeted by a white-on-blue IBM logo on the screen. The software detected the broken CMOS configuration, proceeded to automatically configure the system, then asked me to press Enter to restart.

 

...which still didn't fix the errors I was getting, so I assume that, at the very least, the battery inside that Dallas chip is as dead as it can be.

 

For this battery issue, there's two courses of action: First, get a replacement chip off of eBay, most likely a fake from China, as apparently neither this nor other compatible models of the chip are still being manufactured officially. Or second, literally hack up the existing chip to expose the battery contacts, break them, solder on an external battery holder and attach that to the chip's package. I opted for the former, for now at least, hoping that the chip from China is at least a new, good quality fake, and not just a used and possibly already dead original.

 

And that's... pretty much where I am with this machine right now. I'm waiting for the replacement RTC to arrive before I look for and purchase any additional parts for the system, although there's not much you can really get for it anyway -- Micro Channel cards are rather expensive, and the only one I might want is an ethernet card... which would have BNC connectors, which would mean I need some kind of adapter or hub with both connection types to connect it to my modern RJ45 network, which is a pain. So for data exchange, I'll probably just try to use the null modem cable I've used with my Amiga 500 before; MS-DOS has some tools for that, I believe (Interlnk/Intersvr). MCA cards aside, I suppose an FPU would be nice to have, although it probably wouldn't make much of a difference with the software I'm planning to use -- which, well, is really just MS-DOS and maybe Windows 3.11, anyway.

 

As for what I'll be doing with this... I have no idea. It's a low-end 386SX after all, so applications and games alike won't be much fun to use on it, and if I do want or need to use some DOS or 16-bit Windows software, I still have my Pentium 100 tower, as described in my original post. I guess I'll simply be keeping it for its historic significance in IBM's bid to try and recapture the PC market after losing it to the XT/AT clones, as well as introducing technology that ended up becoming standards on many PCs for two or so decades afterwards (VGA, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, etc).

[xdaniel]

Right, so, first things first, because it's kinda pointless to rewrite this for posting it here, have a link to a long, long story about how my life got flipped, turned upside down I acquired a couple of Power Mac G4s, ranging from damaged to dead, and turned them into one pretty decent machine.

 

Now, after you've either read the aforementioned story, or skipped it because it's long-winded and without tl;dr, have the (most likely) final specifications of this neat little G4 Mac of mine!

 

 

Power Mac G4 "Not-Quicksilver", aka Tamaki:

• Sonnet Encore/ST G4, 1.6 GHz (PowerPC G4 7447A)
• 1.5 GB PC133 SD-RAM (3x 512 MB)
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 128 MB RAM (+ aftermarket heatsink and fan)
• ExcelStor HDD Jupiter J8160, 160 GB IDE
• HP DVD Writer dvd640c, IDE
• NEC USB 2.0 PCI card
• Stealth Serial Port
• Mac OS X Leopard, v10.5.8

 

I'll probably do a follow-up post to my blog site thingy soon, detailing some of the upgrades I've done, some of the things I've tried out since writing the first one.

 

(Yeah, readership here's probably declined even more since my last post, but eh, whatever...)

[Arcaith]

Nice I had a couple that were completely burned out, so I gutted them both and turned one of them into a Hackintosh.