Official retro Sup Forums thread

Official retro Sup Forums thread

Other urls found in this thread:

zx.zigg.net/LRR/
issi.com/US/product-asynchronous-sram.shtml
gopher.quux.org:70/Software/Gopher/servers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
minuszerodegrees.net/vcf_motherboard_failure_history.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

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Bumping for retro awesomeness~~!

Ew, can't wait this to fade into the darkness of history.

great os btw but died so fast ;_;
msn and core 2 duo times

i have a few

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My new toy I got recently!
486DX4

I'm working on a (somewhat) retro PC build, and currently looking into buying the CPU. Obviously have to buy used/referb. Is it possible that a CPU that's been abused (overvolted, overheated, overclocked, shorted to death, etc.) could damage my other components, my motherboard in particular?

The CPU in question will be a Core2 Duo (probably E7600 or E7500), in case that matters.

>The CPU in question will be a Core 2 Duo (probably E7600 or E7500), in case that matters.
I don't think even a Pentium 4 is considered """"retro""", yet alone a Core 2 Duo, ask in the /sqt/.

It looks different now but this is most of what I have

How old is retro?
I have an Athlon XP machine dual booting Windows 98 and XP for old games.
And a pretty good CRT monitor.

Still using old shitboxes as tables for even older shitboxes?

I dunno how much you guys can help me with this, but in my childhood I visited a friend's house a couple of times, and his father had a pretty neat collection of old computers.

I distinctly remember one setup that he had running on a shelf. Everything was jet black - monitor, keyboard, case(s?), and the monitor was orange monochrome.

He was running ELIZA on it. I can't honestly remember if it was two of the same computers stacked side by side, or if if the case just looked like it, but here's a drawing I made that's about as accurately as I can remember it.

Can anyone identify anything based off this?
(Whoops, just missed the new thread)

Depends, guess when you're 20 and you had a computer 10 years ago, it might aswell be retro for you.

Wow, are you a graphics designer? That's neat!

zx.zigg.net/LRR/

This is a board which replaces the 4116 RAM in the ZX Spectrum with a modern SRAM chip. No idea how it works, but there's only three components on the thing.

I'm 30 but I don't keep my older computers.
That Athlon XP machine was built specificity for old games, in my mind it's a bit too new to be retro, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'd guess it's thanks to that chip left from the memory chip.

Eh?

Haha, thanks. I have no formal training whatsoever and rarely draw anything, like, ever.

That's a 7805 voltage regulator which I believe is used to to downstep the 5V power from the Spectrum PCB to whatever the SRAM uses (probably 3.3V). The other big chip is some thingie to demux the address lines.

This?

In theory this should work on anything that uses 4116 DRAM, though not sure about the Atari 400/800 because custom ICs tend to do funny stuff with the memory addressing.

That's in the ballpark; I'm leaning towards thinking it was just a pair of cases side by side, but it really has been a while - it definitely had big, chunky floppy drives with the eject button/lever, and there weren't any rounded edges on it. It was squarer than a Thinkpad.

Bare with me, I'm using a legacy support motherboard (Asrock 775i65g r3.0) with native drivers back to Win98. The CPU and motherboard may not be retro, but the rest of the PC will be, including it's OS.

>That's a 7805 voltage regulator which I believe is used to to downstep the 5V power from the Spectrum PCB to whatever the SRAM uses (probably 3.3V).

A 7805 regulates a 5v output. 3.3v would be a 7803.

There's probably one on that board because the older chips in the Spectrum can tolerate far more noise & voltage fluctuation than a modern SRAM, so it has it's own linear regulator to be certain that the voltage doesn't exceed 5V.

found this in a box outside a charity shop
I'm fairly sure it was to be thrown away

it works but occasionally the screen fucks up, might be a connection issue

>There's probably one on that board because the older chips in the Spectrum can tolerate far more noise & voltage fluctuation than a modern SRAM
You'd think so but you're way off. Those oldskool DRAMs are very sensitive to voltage levels. In particular, the 4116s will be toasted if the -5V line doesn't come on first at power up and shut off last at power down. They'll form parasitic diodes and self-destruct.

Specs?

RAM is always rated a worst case scenario. For example, 120ns chips can usually run as fast as 60ns while 100ns chips can run up to 55ns.

Not him but he's talking about noise and fluctuation not what lines comes and goes off first.

Guess it depends what modern SRAM chips you use also.

It looks like those speakers would have huge ass magnets inside them fucking with the CRT monitor thanks to that wallpaper

There are some old custom chipsets that don't play well with other chips then the ones they were designed to use.
That's probably why some newly made expansions require things like CPLDs

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issi.com/US/product-asynchronous-sram.shtml

If you look at the chips listed here, they're rated at 10, 12, 15, 25, etc ns. According to the old thread, these would be way too fast for a ZX Spectrum yet that SRAM board appears to have nothing on it to induce wait states. There's just the RAM, a demuxer chip, and a voltage regulator.

If you're talking fucked-up stuff like IBM PS/2s, yes, but they always used their own silly proprietary RAM anyway.

What do you guys think of the TRS-80 PC-2 Handheld?

I found one for AU$50+shipping, does that seem like a good price? I'm honestly not sure what I'd do with it, but it looks like a cool piece of hardware.

Then again, SRAM probably doesn't work the same way as DRAM.

My home office needs some cleaning. So I post old pics.

Best version of Windows with the greatest Internet Explorer all times pre-installed

The speccy works, yeah, but some chipsets know that their RAM works at 120ns and using faster ones will throw them off balance and be prone to be unstable.
Not saying it won't work, but it's not as stable as original if no precautions are taken.

>best version of Windows
>uses 98 not even 98 SE
>not acknowledging that the best version is actually 2000

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How much battery life do these old laptops get?

Bifibro!

>first version to not use annoying ass boot disks
>still semi supported
2000 is the best.

>IN FUNCTION

can't actually get the net on it
it has just a 56k modem

This one's battery is dead, but some work as good as new, there were posts about it in the old thread.

To be fair, an 8-bit computer like the Spectrum has an exceedingly simple architecture. It's probably insensitive to RAM speed as long as it's equal to or greater than what the system board runs at. If you're talking a Windows 9x PC, that's a leagues more complicated machine.

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No PCMCIA?

it has a USB port but drivers for 98 are hard to come by

>If you're talking a Windows 9x PC, that's a leagues more complicated machine

Now take something like an Atari ST or Amiga... Even more complicated

>HIT PUNCH OR KICK TO START GAME
>hit computer
>nothing happens
>punch computer
>nothing happens
>kick computer
>it turns off
what a stupid game

>HIT, PUNCH OR KICK TO START GAME

thanks for clarifying the joke

np

Then again, the C64 has custom ASICs and an extremely tight, timing-sensitive architecture however you can use any RAM of 200ns or faster in them.

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fake, clock on PC is way off current time.

Would be nice to have more mods like this because I always feel slightly uncomfortable about using 30 year old DRAMs which aren't as reliable as more modern types to begin with.

For example, one of the 32kx16 chips and two of the 8kx8 chips listed in would total 640k. Imagine if you could adapt those to an IBM XT. Three chips for the entire system RAM instead of dozens and dozens of 4164s. Even just the amount of power usage you'd cut down on would be huge.

>these would be way too fast for a ZX Spectrum yet that SRAM board appears to have nothing on it to induce wait states

I don't think it should matter as long as the output is latched so it's there whenever the slow CPU gets around to reading it from the fast SRAM.

AOL still have dial up; I suspect a few other ISPs do, too. Go rock that 56k dialup, user. For science.

Right. The other guy kept insisting that it would be impossible to use faster RAM on a 8 or 16 bit computer without intentionally adding wait states, but that contradicts everything I've always heard which is that the RAM speed is unimportant as long as it's equal or greater than what the system is rated for.

56k is more useless on the web today than the computers they're attached to.

Vista was a fun time

So this post, Dude emailed back and wants only 150$ now instead of 235$... there's a bunch of other parts and stuff, again same sorta era... I think I saw a P2 or so. Should I go for it now?

56k is plenty fast, if you're selective. Fire up that bad boy and hit Gopherspace: gopher.quux.org:70/Software/Gopher/servers

What's that? None of the browser links work, unfortunately.

That's because most browsers have dropped support for Gopher, the bastards.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

Oh wait, looks like IE5 works?

what the fuck that yellow one looks like a microwave

Or hitup some BBS's over telnet, or wirh your number if you can. Really get back into that retro space.

It's a portable something.

We had the retro threads on /vr/ but they move at like 2 posts per hour and struggle to get more than 10 IPs per thread.

There are boards like that sold already for the XT.
8-bit ISA memory expansions using new chips.

What's up with "retro" fags in these threads that have no clue about anything.

As I understood him he said that there are computers that are picky about RAM and run unstable without those modifications.

There's one right now

BBSes don't really have people on them anymore.

And it's just like I said.

minuszerodegrees.net/vcf_motherboard_failure_history.htm

That's nice because judging by this, bad RAM is the second most common failure mode on IBM PCs/XTs next to capacitors.

How do you solve the parity issue? XT boards have an extra chip in each bank used for parity checking and while this can be disabled for expansion boards, you can't turn the parity checking off for the RAM on the motherboard.

Sadly.

But luckily they are socketed DIPs and easy to replace.
But still, glad to have options.

I would not get it for that price, but then again I usually only buy cheap local shit I find.

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Most are completely dead or have only a few minutes before turning off

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Maybe something NEXT-related?

98SE is only worth it if you want unstable WDM drivers
98 is more stable on Pentium1 than 98SE

How epic it might have been to actully read visual novels back in the windows 98 era. Japanese to english translated visual novels were rare I assume? But instead of vn I think you got your time killed watching Initial-d out of VHS and such. To think that you had to be quite /fit/ to carry this tech with you compared to the 21st century

Post Sun hardware!

BiFibro, have you gotten anything new too recently?

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Hey bro.

I have that same keyboard, its nice.