/retro/ - retro, vintage, old computers

I like restoring old computers, do you?

Other urls found in this thread:

lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_1MB_RAM_Board
rkirchhof.com/Electromigration.html
stanislavs.org/helppc/bios_data_area.html
classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2010-09-04-fixing-an-atari-400-screen-issue.htm
cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

PC tech wagecuck here. Gotta say, love when the old stuff comes in.
>toggle switches
>that hum of the old monitors
>red, orange or green faggot? Lol

It's just fun. And it's amazing how durable that old shit is. Got a compaq portable 3 that still boots, works fine.

Before we begin, the following people/things are banned from this thread:

1. That dude's Apple II terminal pics
2. That other dude's IBM AT terminal pics
3. Complaining about Ebay prices
4. Obnoxious circlejerk posts like "Wow dude, your system looks awesome XD"
5. People who complain derp why wud u want 2 use old shit like dat
6. Copypasted Lemon 64 posts
7. Advertisements/shilling for 1541 Ultimates or other crap like that

>red, orange or green faggot? Lol
What are you referring to?

>And it's amazing how durable that old shit is.
Indeed, the build quality of most of the old shit is amazing.

Topkek, witness the butthurt!

you won't get a qt gf restoring old computers

Too late, already got one.

>Indeed, the build quality of most of the old shit is amazing.

Yeah all those Commodore 64s blowing their PLA chips out of the box were the apex of good build quality.

>most of the old shit

Is this 1994?

>like you get anything older than about 2002 in for repairs.

I think the lengthy repair threads on VCFED argue otherwise. Come on, I bet you also think a 1950s car is as durable as a modern one.

RAM and hard disks especially are far more reliable than they were in 1984.

IDK. I knew a guy who took his Altair 8800 with genuine 1975-vintage ICs in it to computer shows and ran it for a couple hours a day with nothing bad happening.

Not him but.
There are so many collectors and retro fags who don't know shit about electronics themselves and who give in their shit for repairs. You can easily make money just doing even that.

Yeah, I've had shit that had been thrown out of second floor windows and still worked, even hard drives.
Sure chip fabrication has advanced, but still most of the old chips still work, also they don't blow the second you fuck up with them and many can even run on less cleaner power than todays.

But I guess the build quality refers more to the design of the systems, less tiny circuitry and glue, more robust materials.

I agree with some of this, but these threads would just get out bumped and die without them.

My dad worked at a Radio Shack circa 2000 and sometimes people actually did bring in TRS-80s and junk like that but they were told "Shit, nigger, we can't fix this old crap. This isn't flappin' 1985."

So that's why I call bunk on

Anybody know what makes an old CRT image start to jitter up and down as it warms up? Vsync maybe?

You wouldn't lie on the Internet, would you?

There was a guy on VCFED who complained his Compaq Portable that he restored kept eating RAM chips. He kept blaming it on the Louisiana weather and 30 year old NOS chips he bought, when he seemed unable to figure out that he probably had bad capacitors that were causing an overvoltage condition (he claimed the Compaq was in poor condition when he got it).

Yeah, some people are not very tech savvy. That's how a lot of things get bad reputation.

If he had that many problems, he should just get one of these.

lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_1MB_RAM_Board

And he can send it to who will assemble one for him.

That would have not fixed the problem with the caps.
Mostly caps that are 20 years+ will be dead even if they look fine, this causes a lot of problems with that old tech.

Here it is. He claims the PSU in the computer is fine, but I highly suspect bad caps were killing his RAM. It's not normal for that many to fail in such a short amount of time. The one other guy actually points out the possibility of this, but it doesn't seem to register with him.

Radio Shack is bull anyways, small businesses are the thing to go to.
The guys who work from home are even better, sometimes you see ads like "TV repair".

Actually it's a problem most of the time when you let electronic devices sit powered off for a long period of time. It causes the capacitors to dry out, thus it's good to power stuff on once in a while and "exercise" them.

I got an old tektronix 2247a oscilloscope, but it wont turn on. instead it 'chirps'. what part of the PSU is broken?

"Absolutely a possibility. But I've already scoped out the power supply and..."

Good PSU =/= bad caps on the motherboard or cards.

Yeah, I have seen shit like that before.
A full recap is always recommended even before you fire the thing up specially it has been sitting in a shed for years.

Is only a problem with electrolytic caps though? I don't think this applies to tantalum caps.

Sadly most sit in a basement and don't see the light of day for decades.

He didn't say where it was stored, other than that it was in bad condition.

You can also replace 4164s with 41256 chips by grounding one pin; those are extremely reliable. The Amiga and Atari ST AFAIK have 41256 RAM in them and I've rarely heard of RAM failures in those.

I remember one thread where a guy powered on his original Apple II from 1978 after more than 25 years (it hadn't been used since 1984). He took it out of its official Apple cloth zip-up bag and it worked fine.

It does seem that RAM overall got more reliable when they switched to SIMMs instead of single chips. IDK why. Maybe the chips are protected better due to not having direct contact with the system board.

rkirchhof.com/Electromigration.html

And remember, if a chip goes bad you can always try reviving it with the oven trick much beloved of PC graphics card fags. This won't work if it got fried from ESD or a bad power supply though.

>sitting in a zipped cloth bag
>as opposed to sitting in a barn and used as a mouse nest for years

I don't think they make tantalum caps anymore. At least, I can't find any for sale other than NOS, but you can just replace them with any electrolytic cap of the same rating.

Yeah, I had a XT that had been sitting in a basement for 23 years and fired it up and it worked too.
But a 486 I had that only had been unused for almost 20 years died after half an hour of use, you never know.

Yeah, I figured that out myself too and found about it online too.

I once had a problem with a 256k stick in a 386 PC. The computer passed the POST test, but it wouldn't detect the joystick port which indicated a problem in the bottom of memory where the BIOS data area is located.

stanislavs.org/helppc/bios_data_area.html

0040:0010 is where this data is stored. Apparently there was a stuck bit here. I also kept getting random Parity Check errors while using the computer. After installing a different SIMM, the problem went away and I regained use of the joystick.

There was another guy who cleaned up an incredibly dirty IBM PC with playing cards jammed in one disk drive (wtf) but it worked, passed the POST, and went to cassette BASIC.

POST tests aren't that good and will often miss memory faults especially if it's a very small one like a stuck bit in one RAM chip.

Here is a pic of the back of the supply
What could cause this burnt spot? I took out the nearest capacitor but I have nothing to test it with ;~;

Here's the top of that area

Generally speaking, Japanese brands of RAM from this period were considered the best quality. In fact HP (who did not manufacture RAM themselves, thus could be considered a trustworthy, neutral source) did a study which determined that RAM made by NEC or Sharp or Panasonic were more reliable than RAM made by US manufacturers like TI, Fairchild, and Mostek.

This led to a lot of people buying Japanese instead of US RAM, so outraged manufacturers demanded restrictions on imports of the stuff. The Reagan Administration obliged, leading to a RAM shortage for a while in the late 80s.

Gee, I wonder how many VIC-IIs, SIDs, and TEDs could have been saved if only more people thought to try this.

Further down in that same thread, a guy said his Atari 800 had never had bad RAM despite it using the failure-prone 4116s.

The first two maybe, the TED maybe not because it was really the lousy manufacturing process that causes them to fail at an alarming rate.

classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2010-09-04-fixing-an-atari-400-screen-issue.htm

His ANTIC seems to have suffered an electromigration failure. I bet the oven trick would have worked here, too bad he didn't know that.

Shorted ICs usually get really hot and you'll burn your finger if you touch them. If a failed chip runs at a normal temperature, it's more likely an open circuit caused by electromigration or some other such failure.

I guess that's what he meant with "fried"

...

You done goofed now

You really miss the 90's? Don't you?

could you post that wallpaper please?

...

I'd believe it, local hole-in-the-wall electronics stores tend to have lots of old customers still running aging shitboxes into the ground, my fucking XT was still being used by its previous owner until 2005.

There's also shit like trade-ins/disposal that makes that stuff accumulate as well.

>Come on, I bet you also think a 1950s car is as durable as a modern one.
they actually are though, they're just not very safe because the same design that makes them more resistant to damage from fender benders makes them a deathtrap at high speeds

>MS-DOS prompt on Windows NT
>that unskinned show desktop icon
>The MSN/Mail shitware icons that nobody uses on real 9x
Nigger, if you're going to be a nostalgic hipster, do it right.

This. The car will be fine. The people inside will be bounced around like eggs in a hurricane.

My grandfather said when he was a kid in the 50s that you'd drive down Route 5 in California on the weekends and there were always wrecked cars by the roadside with dead or dying people hanging out of them. Gruesome.

Don't you just hate it when dead people are hanging out by the side of the road.

Kek

I'm partying like it's 1999

FWIW drunk driving was not seen as a big deal in those days.

derp why wud u want 2 use old shit like dat

Anyone know how I can find more out about the CPU through Windows 98?

All I gots is this.

This bait is sub Sup Forums quality.

>dxdiag

Also CPU-Z

cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

I think CPU-Z should still work on it.

Not still, but again.
They added back Win98 support what was missing for a while.

You don't get to dictate what people post, fuck off.

Huh, better give that a go.

I doubt this thing can support usb2.0 sticks, and I can't network it. I'll have to burn a CD.

While I'm at it, any other software I should throw on it? Any good game recommendations? (All I know is it lags *slightly* on Quake when things get busy.)

>can't network it
How did it browse to Sup Forums then?

Confirmed for one of the trolls mentioned on the list.

Nevermind, I see there are two Win98 machines here.

>ModPlug Player
>Eiffel 65

I'm not trying to be a nostalgia fag, but 1999 was awesome

WCPUID works in win98

1541s are pretty shitty desu. The Alps mech ones get out of alignment and the Newtronics ones have a drive head that wasn't sealed properly leading to a high failure rate.

You triggered?

Why the fuck is complimenting /retro/battlestations banned? Fuck you.

Reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations for actually friendly retro discussion.

>mooom, I went to a thread I didn't even make and posted rules for it, now everybody tells me to fuck off!

He triggered.

I'm pretty sure that's running a 8088, aka XT clone, he was talking about an AT.

He's just too stupid to tell the difference, even where there has been discussion on this kind of threads about it.
This is my XT clone and yes, he was referring to me.

fuck off back to you autistic piece of shit
this is why /retro/ failed

friendly reminder to ignore faggots like this
the second they try to enforce rules and an "official" sticky it's over

>I doubt this thing can support usb2.0 sticks
they do, it's backwards compatible
I use a little 1 GB datatraveler and it works just fine on Windows 95/NT4 and up, probably would work with DOS/3.x too but I never tried it

Just had a quick check. The thing doesn't even have a USB port. It really shouldn't be running windows 98...

I wanted to start the thread myself but I didn't because now Sup Forums has this gay shit that you're only allowed 5 threads per IP and I would have been maxed out.

you can stick a USB card in it

honestly don't bother wasting a CD-R on some 2 MB program, just open the damn thing up and pop off the heatsink, you'll get more info that way anyway

If he's gonna do that he might as well just put in a network card and be done with it.

he'd still need to get drivers on it though, flash drives are way more convenient than dealing with the afterthought that was networking on 9x anyway

That user does have a point with a lot of that though. There's no purpose in this general existing if it's just a 24/7 circle jerk with no new content being created or actual discussion. If anons can't keep up creating new content to discuss then this thread should be dialed back to once weekly.. The Comfy Shitposting Device general was a good example of this, it went on for a while with new content in every thread, then it became less common when every thread became the same shit over and over again and was eventually killed instead of kept on life support with no real new content.

>dialed back to once weekly.

No need, it does not bother anyone if one is running 24/7, there are GPU and Maki threads on Sup Forums what do not deserve board space at all, this thread is not violating any rules, if you don't like it, don't post in it.

Sup Forums is a faster board then /vr/, once weekly would mean the thread would be over in a matter of hours.

there IS no purpose in this general existing, but that doesn't mean you need to turn it even more to shit with the same autism and "stop posting things I don't like" mentality that makes the /vr/ retrocomputing threads so boring and shitty

stop fucking worrying about it and just discuss old shit, if the occasional "hey your computer is really nice user" post is really triggering you that much, make your own thread about "new content" YOU want to discuss and fuck off to it, maybe I'll even participate in it

>if you don't like it, don't post in it.
They don't get it user, useless to tell them.

As soon as I'm done getting it running, I'll post pics of my Sun Cobalt Qube server.

>"stop posting things I don't like"
Kek, I always think people like this are trolls, but I begin to realize that they actually exist.

Holy shit, that little thing must be awesome!
Can't wait!